A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets. The quest to discover meaningful commercial applications for blockchain, beyond cryptography apps, has begun across the globe.
451 Research revealed that 28 percent of enterprises are now evaluating or using blockchain, although fewer than 3 percent have any production applications.
Blockchain market development
According to the study, 20 percent of organizations surveyed are using blockchain in a discovery or evaluation phase, 4 percent running trials or pilots, 2 percent in test and development environments, 2 percent undertaking initial implementations of production applications and less than 1 percent have broad implementation of production applications.
Furthermore, the market is rife with vendor misrepresentation about blockchain apps, and there is little understanding about how enterprise leaders can deploy blockchain profitably while navigating a market with thousands of vendors and hundreds of consortia vying for mind-share.
The 451 Research blockchain codex systematically decodes this market, pursuing the goal of replacing confusion and complexity with an examination of the technology components and guidance on first steps.
451 Research analysts believe blockchain has the potential to be the active ingredient for establishing universal trust among parties through clever code and peer-to-peer consensus.
In the enterprise sector, where smart contracts will dictate terms and cloud-tasking using multiple providers is the norm, there will be a need for transparency and an immutable system of record.
At the edge, IoT devices could take advantage of blockchain for authentication and to store and share interactions and data. Numerous other commercial applications will evolve over time.
"Blockchain will do for transactions what the Internet has done for information. It promises to disrupt business models and entire industries. It allows for increased trust and efficiency, and is pushing us to challenge how we define and exchange value and reward participation," said Csilla Zsigri, senior analyst at 451 Research.
Outlook for blockchain application development
With a scarcity of skills in blockchain technology and potential applications, there is a tremendous opportunity for third-party expertise that can help define and support proof of concepts and initial deployments.
More CIOs and CTOs seek information and guidance to gain an understanding of what blockchain is, how it works and how it can be applied in use cases. They're also eager to learn what those organizations and industries at the forefront of this nascent distributed ledger technology have accomplished, thus far.
Read more: IBM ends revenue decline, says it has strengthened cloud and blockchain leadership