(originally published October, 2017)
Private and public organizations have shown how the blockchain can transform banking, energy, supply chain, healthcare and other industries, leading to billions of dollars in cost savings and benefits. With blockchain technology, costly intermediaries and fees can be removed from payments and supply chains. The time it takes to make an asset transfer or other transaction can be reduced from months to minutes or less. And the blockchain’s real-time transparency can dramatically reduce the time needed to update people and the costs of maintaining redundant data. If a change needs to be made after a transaction is executed, the transaction and corrective change will be captured on the blockchain. In this way, data integrity is ensured. As a result, organizations around the world have projects to harness blockchain technology as part of their digital transformation strategy.
However, blockchain infrastructure and applications can be time consuming to deploy, expensive to manage, difficult to scale, and challenging to integrate with other blockchains. Blockchain resources are difficult to find. Blockchain protocols change and frequently. As businesses evolve, they are adding new types of blockchains to better address use cases. Now, when I speak to large organizations, they have projects on 2 or more types of distributed ledger technology.
Evolution of Blockchains
