What's Changing? - Blockchain

Please see below recent blockchain-related developments.

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Blockchain

March 2023

After analysing over US$230 million worth of blockchain activity, Elliptic found that pro-Ukrainian fundraising campaigns received substantially more cryptoassets ($212.1m) than pro-Russian wallets ($4.8m). They also showed that $0.7m had been received by anti-government entities in Belarus, a key ally of Russia. Only 1.8% of crypto donations towards Ukraine seemed to come from illicit sources, against 10.2% for Russia.

December 2022

Further reading:
- It’s Time to Take Another Look at Blockchain - Sloan Review

July 2022

The State of Blockchain Q2 22 Report, from CB Insights highlighted how the sector is evolving, with funding shifting away from centralised crypto exchanges and wallets toward NFTs, gaming, and infrastructure & development.

June 2022

Further reading:

March 2022

Investment in blockchain companies surged from US$3bn in 2020 to US$25bn in 2021. As the technology gains traction beyond crypto, industries from insurance to gaming are seeing blockchain applications. CB Insights analysed the latest innovative ways companies are harnessing the power of blockchain.
Annual spending on blockchain solutions is expected to reach nearly US$16bn by 2023. Entrepreneurs are targeting a wide range of industries with the technology:
- Insurance: Insurance giants and startups alike are using blockchain technology to prevent insurance fraud, track medical records, file claims, and more.
- Real estate: Real estate blockchain applications can help record, track, and transfer land titles, property deeds, liens, etc. When merged with virtual reality and gaming, blockchain is making it possible to buy virtual land.
- Food & beverage: As a decentralised ledger that records, stores, and tracks data, blockchain provides a way to monitor the food supply chain and trace contamination issues to their root.
- CB Insights also analysed more than 60 other industries blockchain could transform.

November 2021

Following a record-breaking Q2, global blockchain/crypto venture funding continued to climb to new highs in Q3 2021, noted CB Insights.

July 2021

The first half of 2021 was a record blockchain tech, which reached new equity funding and media coverage milestones. Blockchain companies raised over $7bn in venture capital and private equity funding in H1 21 - higher than that raised over the course of any full year in history.

April 2021

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) partnered with blockchain firm Evernym on their COVID vaccine passport system, Travel Pass, which was piloted by 23 global airlines. Elsewhere, New York State’s Excelsior Pass used IBM’s blockchain-based Digital Health Pass platform.

March 2021

China’s 14th Five Year Plan will declare blockchain a key technology. It will mean increased state support for blockchain research; the Five Year Plans are China’s most important strategic documents, noted New World, Same Humans.

December 2020

Technology expertshave spent years trying to use bitcoin’s blockchain architecture for other applications in finance, but so far blockchain companies have produced more press releases than viable enterprises, warned Quartz. For example, according to DocuSign CEO Daniel Springer, blockchain is still too expensive for the kinds of things his company does.

August 2020

Yet, as the blockchain space continues to mature, there has been a shift in the enterprise mindset. While “enterprise blockchain” was once defined by private networks, the blockchain space is entering a new era, one that is bound to be dominated by public blockchain adoption. Author and advisor Alex Tapscott told Cointelegraph that the future of enterprise adoption will be built on public blockchains
HBR claimed that blockchain-based payment systems can bring the more than 1.7 billion people who are unbanked or underbanked into the formal economy. And in doing so, they can render obsolete the expensive, usurious payment and informal financial services those people use to make ends meet. A generational pandemic makes this challenge all the more urgent, as decades of (admittedly uneven) economic progress are erased.

March 2020

Blockchain has had its critics. PwC blockchain specialist Alex de Vries pointed out that the global power consumption for servers running the software for blockchain-powered Bitcoin is almost that of Ireland. But not all blockchain was created equal, explained Aparna Jue, product director at cryptocurrency platform IOHK, which claims to have created the “world’s most sustainable blockchain”. “There are two methods of blockchain - proof of work and proof of stake. Proof of work, which Bitcoin is built on, involves brute force, puzzle-solving computational power. With this method you run a mining pool with many computers trying to solve a problem.” Proof of stake, brainchild of IOHK (whose CEO Charles Hoskinson is also co-founder of cryptocurrency Ethereum), does not rely on such computational power.

September 2019

Governments in many countries want to be part of the growing virtual currency trend. By replacing hard-to-track cash with state-issued digital money, governments can more easily find out who is buying what from whom. That could help catch tax cheats and fraudsters, creating more government revenue that can be spent for the public good, and shake up how government technocrats track economic growth and inflation. But depending on how a sovereign digital currency was designed, it could also give the state a powerful new tool to help it spy on citizens. For some governments, that's not a bug, it's a feature, noted GZEROMedia.

August 2019

Blockchain can help strengthen trust in those who record or verify with trust in a decentralised network secured through cryptography. IBM’s Food Trust was one of the first production enterprise blockchain systems (with Walmart). The French grocery chain Carrefour recently announced that fruits and vegetables whose provenance is tracked through the system sell better.

March 2019

Vault Platform is a blockchain-based tool that enables employees to securely capture and report harassment. The app is designed to create a time-stamped, tamper-proof record of the incident in question. The reports can either be stored privately on a user’s phone, or shared with an employer. Trend Watching believes that the most striking feature of the app is its ‘GoTogether’ feature. This alerts employees if other people have recorded incidents relating to the same individual, and using a ‘blind network’ enables them to collectively share their reports with their employer while preserving their anonymity from each other.

February 2019

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January 2019

Blockchain over recent years has been extolled as a revolution in business technology. In the nine years since its launch, companies, regulators, and financial technologists have spent countless hours exploring its potential. The resulting innovations have started to reshape business processes, particularly in accounting and transactions. However, blockchain has yet to become the game-changer some expected, cautioned McKinsey.
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December 2018

Banking isn't the only industry that could be affected by blockchain tech. Law enforcement, ride hailing, and many other sectors could also have blockchain in their future, according to CB Insights.
Blockchain is changing the art world. claimed Quartz. It’s good for secure transactions that preserve the anonymity favoured by many art buyers and sellers.
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November 2018

A year ago, cryptocurrency investors were looking forward to a triumphant holiday season. Bitcoin was trading at about $8,200, and heading north. Much has happened since, noted Quartz, and little of it good for crypto investors who didn’t sell near the top. After cresting above $20,000 in December 2017, bitcoin went into in a steady slide and giving up a year’s worth of gains. There’s no one reason for the sell-off, but a few factors have been working against bitcoin and its cousins like ether and ripple. Fallout from the bitcoin cash fork - the crypto world’s equivalent of financial engineering - seemed to be creating uncertainty across all cryptocurrencies, while recent SEC enforcement actions may be adding another layer of chill.
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October 2018

Blockchain hype peaked in the media in 2017 when “cryptomania” hit the trading markets. More recently, attention has turned to how it will be regulated, while in a survey released this month more than four out of five executives (84%) reported their organisations had blockchain initiatives underway – dominated by financial services.
Going further, Nouriel Roubini claimed that now that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have plummeted from last year's absurdly high valuations, "the techno-utopian mystique of so-called distributed-ledger technologies should be next". The promise to cure the world's ills through "decentralisation" was just a ruse to separate retail investors from their hard-earned real money.
Still, as blockchain technology finds use beyond cryptocurrency, enterprise software is likely to be an early adopter. With the need for faster, simpler ways to record transactions and manage data, Barclay analysts think this will be a $43 billion opportunity.
Understanding how blockchain creates business value is essential for companies to identify the right use cases and move beyond small pilots to widespread adoption, argued McKinsey, explaining how companies can drive business value through blockchain - but also how business leaders can determine when blockchain is and isn’t the right innovation.
However, The World Economic Forum believes that even as an emerging technology, blockchain has so much more relevance than digital finance alone. It is also poised to disrupt how we think about and manage the world’s most pressing environmental issues.
Walmart announced that it would be requiring all its leafy green suppliers join its blockchain platform so that the retailer can track the journey of each product. Powered by IBM, Walmart’s new system aims to guarantee food safety, make sure that suppliers follow proper procedures and ensure supply chain transparency in the event of any viral outbreaks. Leafy greens suppliers must comply with the program by September 2019, and Walmart will be requiring other produce suppliers to join in the future.
Further reading:
- CryptoList - A database of Crypto Companies

September 2018

The Future Today Institute's Journalism, Media and Tech Trends report found that blockchain emerged as a significant driver of change in 2019 and beyond, even though the blockchain ecosystem is still maturing.
Crypto markets continued their free fall in the first days of September. More than $20 billion in market capitalisation of crypto assets were erased during one 24 hour period, with values plunging sharply; bitcoin dropped by over $1,000 at one point, dipping below $6,300, while ether hit a one-year low at $211.
Indeed, in recent weeks the bottom has fallen out in the markets for bitcoin, ether, and other crypto assets; ether has fallen by around 70% over the past three months against the dollar.
A new book, Crypotassets, offered a start to those seeking in-depth information on the investment potential of bitcoin, blockchain and cryptoassets. The manual begins with a basic introduction to bitcoin and continues into how digital technologies are disrupting various industries.

August 2018

The World Bank is selling blockchain bonds, according to the FT. Neither the size nor issue date has been announced yet, but it would be the organisation's first bond to be created and run using blockchain technology. The issue will be arranged by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and is named “bond-i,” after the Sydney beach, and also stands for “Blockchain Offered New Debt Instrument”.
The South Korean government integrated blockchain into the public sector, developing the “first public blockchain platform” and issuing community tokens as a type of digital gift certificate.
What is a person without an identity? For refugees throughout the world and millions classed as officially “stateless”, it is easy to lose sight of the human circumstances that put them in that position. However, it shouldn't take extraordinary acts to prove one deserves to be a citizen, noted Prospect, asking whether blockchain could provide an answer.
Blockchains are stalling in corporate deployments, reported Exponential View. “The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I’ve never seen anything like it”, according to one analyst. Another analyst reckons than 90% of blockchain experiments won’t become part of a corporate's operations.
Studying blockchain at university isn’t pointless, argued Quartz, as although cryptomania may have cooled, blockchain-linked expertise will still be in high demand in years to come.
Further reading:

July 2018

Brains and Chains was a recent AI and Blockchain conference which explored the intersection of these two cutting-edge technological trends, and discussed how they can be utilised to create opportunities for innovative solutions.
Hackermoon warned that blockchain technology simply isn’t living up to its promises right now. Claims of decentralising the financial system and the Internet have been stopped in their tracks by one key problem: scalability.
A new study from Boston College found that 56% of cryptocurrency startups that raise money through token sales die within four months of their initial coin offerings. According to the researchers who led the study, new cryptocurrencies see the strongest return in the first month, but usually can’t outperform other cryptocurrencies by month three. CB Insights recently did a deep dive into blockchain technology, including trends in tokens and cryptoassets (get the slides and recording here).
Blockchain was a priority topic at Davos; a World Economic Forum survey suggested that 10 percent of global GDP will be stored on blockchain by 2027.Multiple governments have published reports on the potential implications of blockchain, and the past two years alone have seen more than half a million new publications on and 3.7 million Google search results for blockchain. Most tellingly, noted McKinsey, large investments in blockchain are being made.
While not quite ready for primetime yet, blockchain is getting closer to its breakout moment with every passing day, according to Deloitte’s 2018 Blockchain Survey.
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June 2018

Many crypto enthusiasts are looking at blockchains as a way to correct the sins of the past (government over-reach, lack of sound money, expensive middlemen, centralised businesses, etc.) However, a recent Medium article argued that the truly important questions should be way bigger than this: How can crypto-powered businesses create new types of abundance? How will blockchains drive our standard of living forward exponentially? How will we see the creation of tens of trillions in new value like we did with the stock market in the last 150 years?
Debates around cryptocurrencies and similar technologies are lively and somewhat misinformed. Medium explained the difference between cryptocurrency, blockchain, and crypto-assets, arguing that we must disentangle the three phenomena before making any judgements.
Use cases differ, but the benefits derived from using blockchain remain unchanged: transparency, immutability, redundancy and security. In 2018, new blockchain initiatives are launched every day. Medium shared 50 examples of blockchains in use around the globe.
Arguably one of the most exciting technological developments of the digital age, cryptocurrencies are set to revolutionise global finance and could be the future of money, according to The Cryptocurrencies special report, published in The Times, which covers problems these bold new currencies pose for regulators as well as their potential to aid the betterment of society and the environment.
Whether you want to obtain a university-level understanding or simply just enough of the basics to get added to the office crypto chat, author Steven Johnson’s piece in the New York Times is a good place to start. In it, Johnson explains how by its very nature the blockchain has the potential to be truly disruptive - so disruptive that it’s frequently likened to the internet in the mid to late 90s - and on the verge of revolutionising the way we live.
“We are overemphasizing Bitcoin,” Nobel prize-winning wconomist Robert Shiller said, speaking in Davos earlier this year. “It seems to me it’s a technology for something else...we should broaden it out to blockchain, which will have other applications.”
As bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies gain more acceptance, many wonder if the blockchain technology behind it will usurp the role of banks. According to professors and authors of a recent book, the answer is a resounding no. By applying historical context to the bitcoin craze, the authors shed light on why they think the currency may be unworkable in the long term without a governing central authority.
Blockchain is the fastest-growing skill out of more than 5,000 skills on Upwork, according to the latest Skills Index, a quarterly report that ranks the 20 fastest-growing skills to help shed light on new and emerging skills as an indication of hot freelance job market trends.
In its blockchain and cryptocurrency jargon buster, the FT explained some of the key concepts and terms to understand when talking about blockchain technologies.
Still available and still fascinating is the 2015 FutureProofing podcast which asked: can computer technology and its systems for record-keeping, transparency and verification replace the role of trust in our society? The programme investigated whether blockchain's ramifications could go much further than cryptocurrency and reach into disrupting the roles of government, from providing identity documents to tax collection. Or will governments, banks and other large powerful bodies meet the political and technical challenges of the blockchain by incorporating it into their own activities?
There are dozens of blockchain initiatives in the insurance industry, claimed the FT. The big incumbents, including Axa, Allianz and AIG, are working out how best to use it, as are a series of start-ups. They range from Blocksure and ChainThat, which are developing blockchain-based systems for insurers, to Buzzvault, which uses blockchain to store details of the possessions that its customers want to insure.
Bitcoin crashed after South Korean exchange Coinrail was hacked — Quartz
Blockchain and cryptocurrency jargon buster
Blockchain Consolidation Phase Is Imminent, Hyperledger Chief Says - CIO Journal. - WSJ
Blockchain experiment could cut customs red tape - FT
Blockchain start-up raises more than $4bn - FT
BMW, GM, IBM & Accenture Launch Blockchain Initiative Focused On Automotive Applications | CleanTechnica
Crypto 2.0 - Barclays Investment Bank
Crypto Influencers Pump Up Markets With $105,000 Tweets - Bloomberg
Cryptocurrency could get physical to deliver the stability it needs - Raconteur
Deloitte brings clarity to the blockchain revolution
Insurers hope blockchain will fill their sails - FT
Onboarding the blockchain: How do we get interoperability en masse? — Alternative Market View
Still don't understand the blockchain? This explainer could help - World Economic Forum
The ICO - LinkedIn
Treatment centre for cryptocurrency addicts opens in the Scottish Borders
Who really owns bitcoin now? - FT
Why central banks hate cryptocurrencies | Prospect Magazine
With a blockchain solution, EY says loyalty will pay off - US-China Investment News | Finance, Tech & Real Estate

May 2018

Blockchain is being used to bring new levels of trust and transparency to various activities, according to Trend Watching: Agora’s voting system transformed Sierra Leone’s elections, the first blockchain university is upending how higher education has typically worked, while consumers can monitor their chickens in China to make sure they’re truly free-range.
Bitcoin is on track to consume 0.5% of the world’s electricity this year, claimed Quartz. That’s about as much as the Netherlands; meanwhile, the energy footprint for mining cryptocurrencies is doubling every six months.

April 2018

March 2018

February 2018

January 2018

Pre-2018

Some of the biggest banks, along with technology companies and other firms are making significant investments in research and development to see how they can harness blockchain. These efforts could transform many aspects of business, including how we think about security. Historically, the mainstream cybersecurity philosophy was to build a perimeter wall to keep out intruders. Blockchains could make the perimeter irrelevant by ensuring the integrity of a given network. It is akin to securing the metaphorical veins and arteries of the digital world in order to ensure the health of the body that is the network.
Blockchains, once developed, have the potential to be a powerful solution to many of the security problems faced by financial institutions, argued PwC. The transaction-level cryptographic control associated with blockchains could also extend to manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, the transportation industry, or any sector that makes important products that need to be secure. Blockchain-based technologies at some point could eventually become the backbone for all collaboration and communication that needs to take place in these industries.

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