Consensus Décentralisé - Blockchains - Smart Contracts - Decentralized Consensus

Key Network Statistics

*The assumptions underlying this estimate can be found here.

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Ever since its inception Bitcoin’s trust-minimizing consensus has been enabled by its proof-of-work algorithm. New sets of transactions (blocks) are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain roughly every 10 minutes by so-called miners. While working on the blockchain these miners aren’t required to trust each other. The only thing miners have to trust is the code that runs Bitcoin. The code includes several rules to validate new transactions. For example, a transaction can only be valid if the sender actually owns the sent amount. Every miner individually confirms whether transactions adhere to these rules, eliminating the need to trust other miners.

The trick is to get all miners to agree on the same history of transactions. Every miner in the network is constantly tasked with preparing the next batch of transactions for the blockchain. Only one of these blocks will be randomly selected to become the latest block on the chain. Random selection in a distributed network isn’t easy, so this is where proof-of-work comes in. In proof-of-work, the next block comes from the first miner that produces a valid one. This is easier said than done, as the Bitcoin protocol makes it very difficult for miners to do so. In fact, the difficulty is regularly adjusted by the protocol to ensure that all miners in the network will only produce one valid bock every 10 minutes on average. Once one of the miners finally manages to produce a valid block, it will inform the rest of the network. Other miners will accept this block once they confirm it adheres to all rules, and then discard whatever block they had been working on themselves. The lucky miner gets rewarded with a fixed amount of coins, along with the transaction fees belonging to the processed transactions in the new block. The cycle then starts again.

What kind of work are miners performing?

The process of producing a valid block is largely based on trial and error, where miners are making numerous attempts every second trying to find the right value for a block component called the “nonce“, and hoping the resulting completed block will match the requirements (as there is no way to predict the outcome). For this reason, mining is sometimes compared to a lottery where you can pick your own numbers. The number of attempts (hashes) per second is given by your mining equipment’s hashrate. This will typically be expressed in Gigahash per second (1 billion hashes per second).

Spotify has acquired the Brooklyn-based blockchain startup Mediachain Labs, whose team will join the company’s office in New York where they will work on developing better technology for connecting artists and other rights holders with the tracks hosted on Spotify’s service. Prior to its acquisition, the startup had developed several technologies that could aid in these efforts, including a decentralized, peer-to-peer database to connect applications with media and the information about it, as well as an attribution engine for creators, and a cryptocurrency that rewards creators for their work.

In short, the startup was working to leverage blockchain technology in order to help solve problems with attribution.

This is an area where Spotify can use some help, as it turns out. Last year, Spotify settled a licensing dispute with the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in the U.S. over unpaid royalties.

According to the NMPA, Spotify had failed to obtain mechanical licenses – which refer to a copyright holder’s control over the ability to reproduce a musical work – for a large number of songs on its service, The New York Times had reported. The issue could impact other streaming services as well, the NMPA said, estimating that as much of 25 percent of the activity on streaming platforms is today unlicensed.

Spotify at the time agreed to pay over $20 million to music publishers as a result of this settlement, in addition to a $5 million penalty. While the company likely avoided several class action lawsuits as a result of the settlement, it spoke to a larger problem in the industry.

Spotify had claimed that it didn’t pay out the royalties because it simply didn’t have the necessary data to help it figure out whose claims were legitimate, or even how to locate the parties. It said it lacked an authoritative database that covered all existing music rights. This opens it up to litigation, which is obviously not the ideal way of managing these payments.

With Mediachain, Spotify potentially has a solution on its hands – but instead of building out a centralized database with music rights information, it looks like it will build a decentralized one.

As Mediachain explains in a blog post, its vision for the problem with attribution is a shared data layer, which is says “is key to solving attribution, empowering creators and rights owners, and enabling a more efficient and sustainable model for creativity online.”

It also helps that the team at Mediachain has music industry experience. The company noted in the post that its CTO Arkadiy Kukarkin was the first engineering hire at the music curation aggregator Hype Machine, and before starting Mediachain Labs, co-founder Jesse Walden had co-founded and run an artist management firm that worked with artists including Solange Knowles, Blood Orange and Majical Cloudz.

Mediachain says it will turn over the technology it had already built to the open source community as it moves to Spotify.

Deal terms were not revealed, but Mediachain had raised $1.5 million according to CrunchBase, from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and others.

The latest news in the Bitcoin space is one that has been in the making for four years: the Winklevoss’ twins Bitcoin ETF will soon be accepted, or rejected, by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC). This decision will leave ripples in Bitcoin’s history, and it’s the first step to legitimizing Bitcoin’s acceptance with the general public.

But first, let’s look at what an ETF is, and why they’re so important.  

Mutual and Exchange-Traded Funds

Funds are important – it’s a building block towards a particular purpose. The most common type of fund – a retirement fund – is a sum of money for after we’ve entered retirement, allowing us to live comfortably in our older years.
 
There are many kinds of funds, but the two main ones are mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds.
 
In a mutual fund, you’re sitting around, trying to figure out the best way to invest in the stock market. Your friends are, too. Sure, you could go out and buy a few stocks each, but you don’t really have the time – or the resources – to manage a diverse portfolio of 50, to 100 stocks. You can’t keep up on the news of when to buy and sell; you don’t know all the different buying and selling strategies, and you don’t have a lot of time to learn. So, what do you do?
 
You and your friends decide to band together, and pool all of your money you’d have spent individually on stocks into a professional investment manager instead. This manager is going to do all the hard work, for a little share of the profit.
 
To keep track of who has invested what (you might have invested one-thousand dollars, but Bobby next door only invested fifty dollars, the stingy bastard), you and each of your friends receive a share – a little token, representing your stake in the total investment. The more tokens you have, the more you’ve invested.
 
You still want to know what your money is doing, though, and you want dailyupdates. So every day, you investment manager tallies up the value of everything it owns, and divides it by the number of shares that exist. Now, you know exactly what each share is worth. If you want to buy more shares, you’re going to know the exact amount of cash to send your investment manager; if you want to sell shares, you’re going to know the exact amount of cash to expect in return. It’s a rather elegant system, and can be used for all sorts of things – stocks, bonds, commodities, and other assets.
 
And then, there’s exchange-traded funds – or ETF’s, for short.
 
An ETF is a type of mutual fund, too, except for one big change. A mutual fund is traded at the end of the day, all at once; an ETF can be traded through the day, like a stock. A mutual fund is steady, and prevents the market from fluctuating at certain hours; an ETF does the opposite, just like a stock, allowing you to potentially make it big if you’re lucky, or clever. Buy shares in the morning, sell them after lunch, buy them again before the sun sets – there’s no limit.
 
You’ll also be able to perform all sorts of stock-like strategies that you can’t perform with a mutual fund – things like selling short; placing a stop-loss; placing a limit order; or buying on-margin.
 
In short, an ETF is a powerful tool with the potential for great risk, but even greater reward. But it’s also simple, transparent, tax efficient, and well structured, and you can access it through any brokerage account.  

A blockchain venture backed by Chinese conglomerate Wanxiang Group has launched a new startup accelerator.

The kick-off, which formally took place on 22nd February, comes soon after Wanxiang pledged to spend as much as $30bn on a smart cities initiative, set to be invested over a seven-year period. As part of that plan, Wanxiang, best known as the country's biggest makers of automotive parts, said it would look to fund blockchain entrepreneurs.

As a continuation of that plan, China’s first dedicated blockchain accelerator – dubbed the 'Chainbase Accelerator' –  will initially launch with four startups under its wing.

During the launch event in the Hongkou District of Shanghai, Feng Xiao, vice president and executive director of China Wanxiang Holdings – the group’s financial arm – invoked its smart city initiative once again, stating that the conglomerate sees a role for blockchain in the areas of next-generation energy delivery, digital currency and smart governance.

New details have emerged about a soon-to-be-launched initiative focused on enterprise uses of the ethereum protocol.

Dubbed Enterprise Ethereum, the project's founding membership is said to include major financial institutions, tech giants and natural resources companies. According to sources, participating firms include JP Morgan, CME Group, BNY Mellon, Banco Santander, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, Wipro and British Petroleum, among others.

Blockchain startups BlockApps, Brainbot Technologies, ConsenSys, Nuco and Tendermint – as well as the Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit that oversees its code creation – are also said to be involved.

Many of the companies on the list above have already worked with ethereum, such as JPMorgan, which has developed several projects based on that codebase. Notably, Enterprise Ethereum appears to include both existing and former stakeholders in the R3 blockchain consortium.

The initiative is perhaps the most significant to date in terms of enterprise interest and the scale of development being discussed. It also signals a deepening of interest among financial firms in the ethereum platform, albeit one focused in part on implementations that are separate yet compatible with the public ethereum network.

What's more, sources say that members plan to work on initiatives that would relate to both the public ethereum network as well as permissioned or private version.

More companies are expected to join the effort, sources suggest.

Can we outsource medical analysis without giving away our medical information? Can we do biometrical identification without revealing our characteristics? Can we make statistics on data that we do not know? Yes we can, thanks to a cryptographic mechanism called “homomorphic encryption”.

Cryptography has known many transformations over the years. Many centuries ago, it was first used to protect military and political communications. Though very simple, the mechanisms then devised are still the foundation of current cryptography. The introduction of the computer during Second World War considerably increased the computation capacity. This increase reflected on cryptography in the late 70’s, when public key cryptography was invented. Cryptography became a thriving scientific field. Numerous academic works were produced, commercial standards were set and cryptographic algorithms began to secure our daily life. Today, cryptography is everywhere: in our credit cards, in our phone communications, in our internet browsing, etc.
But new services are today under deployment, such as mobile services, cloud computing, BigData or IoT. These services generate and process a huge amount of personal and sensitive information. As users become more and more concerned about their privacy, and industries want to protect their sensitive data, a new challenge arises for cryptography. Indeed, if this data was to be simply encrypted, processing it would be impossible. This leaves users and service providers with a dilemma: choose between usability and confidentiality of these sensitive data. Here comes fully homomorphic encryption!

Les banques d'investissement pourraient économiser entre 8 et 12 milliards de dollars par an d'ici 2025 si elles adoptaient la technologie blockchain, selon un rapport d'Accenture et McLagan publié mardi 17 janvier 2017. 

Blockchain est une technologie permettant de stocker et de transmettre des valeurs au sein d'un réseau informatique. Sa particularité, c'est qu'il est tenu par un réseau de serveurs et opère sans la supervision d'un organe central de contrôle.

Aujourd'hui, chaque banque d'investissement gère de façon indépendante ses propres registres en ligne, de transactions, de données clients etc. 

Selon le rapport du cabinet de conseil, avec la technologie blockchain, les banques passeraient de cette organisation fragmentée à une base de données partagée, sans intermédiaire, où chaque utilisateur de la base pourra vérifier la validité de la chaîne. 

Pour les banques d'investissement, les cabinets de conseil Accenture et McLagan ont trouvé quatre domaines d'activité dans lesquels des économies, allant de 30% jusqu'à 70%, pourraient être générées grâce à l'adoption de la technologie blockchain:

• Les coûts des rapports financiers pourraient être réduits de 70%. Le registre en ligne partagé qu'implique l'adoption de cette technologie permettrait entre autres d'avoir accès à une qualité optimisée des données et à plus de transparence.
• Les coûts de mise en conformité pourraient être diminués de 30 à 50%. 
• 50% d'économies pourraient être réalisées sur les opérations centralisées telles que l'obligation de "connaître son client", notamment grâce à la mise en place d'une source unique de données clients sécurisée.
• Les coûts des opérations courantes dans le domaine bancaire comme la compensation ou la réconciliation des comptes pourraient être réduits de 50%. Pour chaque transaction, une banque donnée effectue une réconciliation des comptes, une opération qui fait état de la concordance entre le solde du compte bancaire présenté dans la comptabilité à un instant donné avec le relevé délivré par la banque. Cette procédure prend du temps et beaucoup d'argent et concerne chaque aspect du secteur des marchés de capitaux.

Massively distributed supercomputing is suitable for those demanding computing problems that are amenable to massive parallelization — splitting a large problem into many smaller tasks that can be farmed out to a distributed network. But there are ways to “parallelize” many computing tasks that, at a first glance, don’t seem suitable for massively parallel computing.

One of the first successful examples of massively distributed supercomputing was SETI@home, a crowdsourced citizen science project started in 1999 to find candidate signals from alien intelligences. The SETI@home system sends millions of chunks of data (“work units”) to the participants, to be analyzed by their home computers. The SETI@home software processes the data on the participants’ computers in the idle times used by screensavers, and sends the analysis results back. Initially powered by custom software, SETI@home was later ported to the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform, which powers other similar projects including the vLHC@home citizen science project for particle physics, managed by CERN.

Volunteer citizen scientists contribute their own computing resources to BOINC projects for karma points and the satisfaction of contributing to important causes. But it seems likely that the new crowdsourced supercomputing paradigm can achieve critical mass only once viable ways to financially reward the participants are introduced.

Enter blockchain technology. It’s worth noting that Bitcoin provided a spectacular demonstration that the general masses will flock to the weirdest ideas proposed by scientists and social activists if they can make money in the process.

TechCrunch ran a story on the potential of distributed ledger technology to usher in a new era of massively distributed computing with next-generation platforms that enable participants to lend and borrow computing resources — and make money in the process.

The story mentions several innovative blockchain companies, including Golem, a Polish company that is developing an “Airbnb for computers” able to “reduce costs and increase speed in domains such as scientific research, machine learning and graphics rendering, while making it possible for anyone with an average or better computer to share resources and make a side income,” with an Ethereum-based transaction system to clear payments between buyers, providers and software developers. Golem’s plans have found favor among investors, resulting in the third-largest platform ICO (Initial Coin Offering) ever, which raised $8.6 million in minutes.

C'est un mot encore peu utilisé ou connu. Et pourtant il a commencé à émerger il y a un an et demi dans les pays anglo-saxons en sortant des milieux informatiques et historiques qui étaient ses seuls champs sémantiques jusque-là. Un salon lui est même consacré à New York. Ce mot c'est "Token", ou "jeton" en français. Et il va changer notre perception du monde et des échanges entre les personnes et les organisations. Ce post pour vous permettre de rattraper une lacune, toute temporaire, et percevoir ce souffle de la transformation mondiale qui s'amorce et va amplifier singulièrement les vagues d'ubérisation et de blockchainisation. Mais pas en partant du haut vers le bas, ou du centre vers les bords. Juste l'inverse : la révolution va venir de la campagne et des "smart towns".

Quelle est l'essence du "token" ?

C'est une des conséquences directes de l'application de la blockchain à de multiples secteurs en dehors de la finance. A chaque nouveau cas d'usage en cours de test à la surface de la terre, on fabrique un token qui est une unité de compte, un quantum d'information en fait, que l'on certifie et authentifie avec la blockchain. Et ce quantum d'information, gravé dans le marbre grâce à un chiffrement éprouvé depuis par le bitcoin depuis 8 ans, peut être de multiples natures : un transfert de propriété, une transaction effectuée entre deux personnes ... Mais une nouvelle forme d'information est en train d'apparaître sous l'influence de ce que permettent les nouvelles technologies blockchain.

Comme le calcul infinitésimal en son temps (Fermat, Leibniz), la technologie apporte une possibilité de découpage et de fabrication d'unités de temps, d'énergie, de prêt, de risque, de soutien ... C'est une véritable usine à produits d'un type très nouveau.

Prenons l'énergie. Notamment si elle est fabriquée par un particulier. Jusque-là cette énergie était "déversée" dans sa totalité sur le réseau national géré par Enedis et RTE. Une sorte de vente en gros à un acheteur ou à une coopérative de la totalité de la production. Et le compte était fait sur une durée longue (journée, mois, année) pour calculer les revenus associés à cela en s'appuyant et en ayant implicitement confiance dans le partenaire historique. Ce calcul macro était largement suffisant pour le particulier qui percevait ses revenus de manière régulière.

L'opportunité (et la légalité) de vendre à son voisin, ou plutôt ses voisins, change profondément la donne : plus question de déverser sa production sans tenir une comptabilité précise de ce qui est produit d'un côté et consommé de l'autre ou des autres côtés. La blockchain permet de fabriquer ces unités plus petites que l'on peut appeler des "crypto-kWh" par exemple et qui ne sont rien d'autre que des kWh dont la production a été authentifiée par un compteur, cette information blockchainisée le plus près possible du point de mesure et transmise sur le réseau sous la forme de nouveau quantum d'énergie fabriqué (heure, durée, intensité, voltage ...) et prêt à être distribué pour utilisation ou stockage. Cela ouvre la voie à la vente au détail entre particuliers. Mais aussi ouvre une nouvelle ère de l'énergie peer-to-peer, l'énergie échangeable entre pairs, exactement comme Napster l'a fait en son temps pour la musique.

C'est cette action de fabrication d'une unité d'oeuvre particulière que l'on appelle tokenisation. De quelque chose de continu ou de masse, on a extrait des unités que l'on peut commercialiser, échanger, valoriser, stocker si c'est possible, transporter, partager ...

Pourquoi la tokenisation va devenir le symbole d'une transformation de masse ?

Ce qui vient d'être illustré pour l'énergie l'est aussi pour de multiples autres éléments et besoins essentiels de la vie de tous les jours : c'est en cela que la déflagration va être d'une force incroyable et concerne tous les citoyens que nous sommes.

Par exemple pour le temps donné aux autres à un niveau local : authentifié, certifié et d'une certaine manière valorisé aux yeux de tous de par la transparence apportée par la blockchain. L'heure de bénévolat (crypto-heure ? ou crypto-bienveillance ? : ) devient un token qui peut lui même être échangé contre un token d'énergie. Avec un avantage : transparence, visibilité, effet d'entrainement et d'émulation ... et action démultipliée à longue distance comme nous le verrons plus loin.

La production agricole peut aussi être tokenisée :

le pot de miel, le kilo de carotte, le saucisson ... se transforment en crypto-miel, crypto-carotte, crypto-saucisson ... qui peuvent être échangés contre de l'électricité ou des heures de garde à domicile ou un dépannage par exemple.

Le prêt de sa voiture offre une belle application de valorisation de cet actif ou propriété individuelle utilisé seulement 3% du temps (oui 97% du temps la voiture est à l'arrêt). Et le succès de Blablacar et dans une moindre mesure celui de Autolib, sont une belle illustration de l'économie de partage qui génère des ... économies. La crypto-voiture n'est pas très loin. Comme d'ailleurs va l'être la crypto-chambre ou crypto-location ...

Extremely interesting map, especially if you play with the interactive timeline at the bottom. France still kind of a laggard though.

The Danish shipping giant Maersk has revealed the completion of its first live blockchain trial, aimed at simplifying the way in which it sends trillions of dollars worth of products around the world.
Coming at a time when the firm that accounts for 15.8% of the world's global shipping fleet traffic has experienced a sharp decrease in annual revenue, the application was designed to help save costs by moving the expensive and time-consuming paperwork between each of the counterparties to a blockchain-based smart contract system.
Built in partnership with IBM using Hyperledger’s open-source Fabric blockchain, the test resulted in a trans-Atlantic shipment of goods from Schneider Electric, a French energy management and automation company.
Following the successful test, Ibrahim Gokcen, chief digital officer for Maersk Transport & Logistics, said that the company sees a potential role for the technology in its supply chain management process, and is exploring other applications as well.

R3 Consortium’s decision to seemingly abandon Blockchain technology altogether has garnered ridicule from cryptocurrency circles.

In a presentation on its Corda platform, the distributed database technology startup, which features some of the world’s largest corporations and banks, said it “didn’t need” a Blockchain.

This lack of need R3 described as a “pertinent feature” of Corda.

R3 has been moving away from involvement with Blockchain for some time. Its language has more recently changed from being a “Blockchain startup” to a “Blockchain-inspired startup,” as director Clemens Wan described it at the Construct conference in January.

"We found that we didn't want a Blockchain, we wanted to be Blockchain inspired,” he said.

Commentators reacted to the startup’s latest tone with thinly-veiled criticism. The Blockchain research process R3 undertook is reported to have cost $59 mln, money which resulted in no Blockchain being necessary.

Bitcoin Think editor Beautyon described the findings on Twitter as R3 “conceding defeat.”

Blockchain technology—the technology underpinning the Bitcoin virtual currency—is being discussed as one of the most potentially disruptive technologies since the Internet. Blockchains are a combination of information technology, cryptography, and governance principles that enables transactions to occur without the need for a third party to establish trust between transacting parties.

To put it another way, in today’s transactions a number of human processes and institutions—such as banks, lawyers, regulators, brokers, and utilities—are paid to establish trust. Blockchain technology replaces these institutions, making it possible to conduct transactions without a third party intermediary.

At Rocky Mountain Institute, we believe that blockchain technology has the potential to play a significant, potentially game-changing role in the global electricity system’s transition to a more secure, resilient, cost-effective, and low-carbon grid.

Blockchain Technology and the Electric Grid

In the face of aggressive growth in distributed energy resources (DERs)—such as rooftop solar, demand response, and electric vehicles—governments, utilities, and other stakeholders from across the globe are experimenting with new ways to better regulate and manage the electricity grid. These experiments currently face four main issues regardless of their geography:  

• Controlling demand is difficult: Customers are concerned about privacy and sometimes loathe to share data—let alone allow third parties to control DERs that they own.

• Tracking flows of energy is imperfect: Energy markets and markets for the attributes of energy (e.g., renewable energy credits) can be expensive to run, can be subject to double spending, and can usually be accessed only via intermediaries.  

• Not everyone can participate in the grid’s evolution: In developed economies, only large, sophisticated businesses are able to enter into off-site power purchase agreements for renewables. In emerging economies, access to capital is a major barrier to accessing DERs and renewable energy, even if these technologies are capable of generating cost savings.

• Putting customers and DERs first is challenging: The entire grid was originally designed from the top down, making it challenging to put customers and DERs first.

Although it is not yet 100 percent clear how, blockchain technology may be capable of solving these challenges:  

• Blockchains provide privacy, enhance cybersecurity, and are a low-cost way of managing DER-focused transactions at the edge of the distribution grid.

• Blockchains provide a more transparent and, at the same time, a more secure way of tracking energy flows than the status quo.

• Blockchains enable small-scale and low-credit customers to participate in business models focused on DERs and renewable energy.

• Blockchains are a key enabler of balancing and managing the grid from the bottom up versus today’s top-down approach.

To unlock this value and help accelerate blockchain technology development in the electricity sector, RMI and Grid Singularity—an Austria-based blockchain technology developer—formed the Energy Web Foundation (EWF).

Depuis plus d’une décennie, nous vivons de multiples révolutions : économiques, sociales, environnementales et même de nos pratiques et usages. Ces révolutions sont portées par de nouvelles technologies qui ont l’ambition de participer à la construction d’un monde meilleur. L’émergence de la blockchain a suscité analyses prophétiques et commentaires enthousiastes. Ce protocole technique inspire une réflexion sur une société plus équilibrée, plus juste et interroge la fabrique de la confiance. Cet essai questionne les transformations portées par la blockchain, en explique les mécaniques de fonctionnement et les prochaines évolutions. Ouvrage de découverte autant que large panorama des travaux accomplis, c’est une manière facile d’explorer cet écosystème. L’innovation est la clé de réussite des nouvelles stratégies entrepreneuriales et la blockchain est une technologie à même de rebattre les cartes. Elle interroge aussi le rôle des institutions, les opposant, en quelque sorte, aux algorithmes.

A l’occasion de la 6e Conférence annuelle du marché boursier du 17 Janvier 2017, Nadia Filali, Directrice du programme Blockchain à la Caisse des Depôts, et Frank Guiader, Directeur de la division Fintech, Innovation et Compétitivité à l’AMF, présentent les atouts de la place de Paris dans le développement de la technologie Blockchain.

It will take years to transform business, but the journey begins now as Blockchain could slash the cost of transactions and reshape the economy.

Transformative applications are still far away. But it makes sense to evaluate their possibilities now and invest in developing technology that can enable them. They will be most powerful when tied to a new business model in which the logic of value creation and capture departs from existing approaches. Such business models are hard to adopt but can unlock future growth for companies.

Consider how law firms will have to change to make smart contracts viable. They’ll need to develop new expertise in software and blockchain programming. They’ll probably also have to rethink their hourly payment model and entertain the idea of charging transaction or hosting fees for contracts, to name just two possible approaches. Whatever tack they take, executives must be sure they understand and have tested the business model implications before making any switch.

Transformative scenarios will take off last, but they will also deliver enormous value. Two areas where they could have a profound impact: large-scale public identity systems for such functions as passport control, and algorithm-driven decision making in the prevention of money laundering and in complex financial transactions that involve many parties. We expect these applications won’t reach broad adoption and critical mass for at least another decade and probably more.

Transformative applications will also give rise to new platform-level players that will coordinate and govern the new ecosystems. These will be the Googles and Facebooks of the next generation. It will require patience to realize such opportunities. Though it may be premature to start making significant investments in them now, developing the required foundations for them—tools and standards—is still worthwhile.

CONCLUSION

In addition to providing a good template for blockchain’s adoption, TCP/IP has most likely smoothed the way for it. TCP/IP has become ubiquitous, and blockchain applications are being built on top of the digital data, communication, and computation infrastructure, which lowers the cost of experimentation and will allow new use cases to emerge rapidly.

With our framework, executives can figure out where to start building their organizational capabilities for blockchain today. They need to ensure that their staffs learn about blockchain, to develop company-specific applications across the quadrants we’ve identified, and to invest in blockchain infrastructure.

But given the time horizons, barriers to adoption, and sheer complexity involved in getting to TCP/IP levels of acceptance, executives should think carefully about the risks involved in experimenting with blockchain. Clearly, starting small is a good way to develop the know-how to think bigger. But the level of investment should depend on the context of the company and the industry. Financial services companies are already well down the road to blockchain adoption. Manufacturing is not.

No matter what the context, there’s a strong possibility that blockchain will affect your business. The very big question is when.