At the end of my Keynote Speeches, I always have a row of CTOs and Innovation Directors asking me where to start a Blockchain Roadmap in their companies. They feel Decentralisation will radically change the market they operate in, but they feel lost with all the buzz around ICOs and Cryptocurrencies. They don’t know where to start, and their job is to figure it out.

“Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.” — Bobby Unser

Throughout 2018, I’ve been fortunate enough to work on countless Blockchain use cases across several industries, company sizes and geos. We started the year with a big focus on ICOs, cryptocurrencies were at all time high prices, the noise was overwhelming and the use cases were mostly futuristic and farfetched to say the least. Nowadays, ICOs have cooled off quite a bit, and Enterprises are taking Blockchain more seriously. As we all embrace this shift in the Blockchain space, the use cases are maturing and now Enterprise stakeholders find them much more realistic and doable. …

Enterprises are now actively exploring Blockchain. They are doing it mostly on a very private level, where it returns the lowest benefits. They all see that Blockchain can bring tremendous value to their industries, but that requires bringing together otherwise distrusting and even competing parties.

Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people. — Steve Jobs

Let’s use a very academic case: the English Premier League. Let’s imagine that Manchester United comes up with an ingenious idea to bring together all the league participants. In this hypothetical case, the idea would be to split the TV rights and Sponsorship funds transparently and fairly through the Premier League’s clubs, in a way that they wouldn’t need the League itself taking a fair share of the profits to act as a centralised intermediary. …

In late 2017 crypto markets were reaching all time highs and many envisioned crypto as the new gold. Now, in late 2018, those markets have reached year long lows and the same ones forecast the demise of crypto.

Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present. — Bill Keane

Through all these crypto craze, ICOs remained as new finance instruments. If you’re an entrepreneur launching a new business you should consider an ICO along traditional funding sources such as Angel Investors or Venture Capital. The ICO landscape looks different from a year ago. And it’s not worse, it’s definitely different, and actually better on many levels. It’s now an ecosystem where value creators can have a say, and where scammers are no longer welcome.

As a Blockchain Consultant and ICO Advisor, these are my observations. …

Blockchain has recently gone through the top of its hype cycle so far. Everyone from small startups to large corporations wants to build Blockchain products and dip their toes into the space. One key question though: Who is going to develop all that software?

Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day. — Fred Ehrsam

As a CTO and Tech Consultant, I’ve been been working closely with entrepreneurs and corporates on innovative products for the past 8 years. Since 2016 I’ve been increasingly approached by companies in the Blockchain space, and got the opportunity to work more and more in a space that I’ve loved for a long time. My typical use cases are architecting and building smart contracts to implement a certain token economy, tech advisory and white paper co-writing for ICOs, and more prevalent in all of my engagements: building Tech Teams for Blockchain projects. …

As the old adage says “There are no old roads to new directions”. The tech world is changing fast, and the talent pool seems smaller than ever. What used to work yesterday might need to be reinvented tomorrow.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay

It’s always an exciting time in my life when I get asked to build a Tech Team. I genuinely love to strategize the profiles, interview awesome candidates and onboard the best of them in a way that enables tech companies to leap into their innovation roadmap.

This has been more challenging over the years, as the battle for talent gets fiercer. …

63 teams. 600+ developers, designers, architects, product and business people from 22 countries. DutchChain organized the largest Blockchain Hackathon ever in Groningen, Netherlands last week. This was sort of the Olympics of Blockchain, and I was there to learn a few things.

We can’t talk about blockchain all the time. We have to talk about what it is doing. And we have to think through how this is actually changing our society for the better. — Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands

The hackathon was huge. A lot of cool stuff got built and everyone learned a lot. Everything was perfect, and the only flaw I could find was that a hackathon can’t just run out of RedBull 12 hours before deadline.

Not all use cases are science fiction (far from it, actually)

The first example to that is my team. During the hackathon we developed a system that encapsulates access control and audit trails on confidential files (eg: healthcare or legal records), in a way that individuals retain complete control and visibility on their personal data. This is not far fetched at all. We see confidential data being leaked every now and then, causing loss of privacy for individuals worldwide and huge fines for the businesses who leaked it. This is something that most businesses should start implementing right now to protect their clients’ and users’ data. …

A decade ago it was Mobile. Then it was Big Data. Nowadays Blockchain is emerging as the new buzzword everyone talks about. This cacophonic hype cycle will never end.

Blockchain is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it too. — Sergio Pereira (adapted from a Dan Ariely’s original)

In innovation, novelty is a key ingredient. You always capture people’s attention by saying things they never heard, they get intrigued and they listen to you… so you do it over and over again. As a buzzword’s novelty washes out, new ones pop up, and the cycle continues.

The media drives the hype cycle

The media business lives on the impressions of the ads that go alongside the articles they write, each time one of their articles is opened they earn their dime. As such, they have a strong incentive to take us to their website, no matter what… so they do just that. They tease us with shocking headlines so we click, they use strong words to provoke us so we comment, they say that Elon Musk did this and that so we share in our social channels. The media industry has learned over time that one proven strategy to capture attention is to create buzzwords, and then create a whole suspense scene around them with supporters and haters, and heroes and villains. With all this fanfare, the media drives people’s attention to these buzzwords and hot topics, to a point that even unconsciously we pay attention to them. …

Innovation is a key to success in the business world. From tiny startups to large corporations, everybody is trying to innovate. But are they doing it right?

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. — Steve Jobs

Software is still eating the world, following Marc Andreessen’s premonition in 2011. Every year we see new technologies disrupting old long established industries, and the challenge is to understand what industries will be disrupted next, and how. Nimble and Agile startups are keen to challenge the status quo, and established company can see their businesses being challenged left and right by these ingenious new solutions.

The reason why we see new startups challenge and take the spotlight from big established companies, is because they are naturally faster to adapt and to serve new market conditions. In such a fast paced world, where change is constant, established companies need to nail innovation, so they can be ahead of the curve to protect and even boost their market share. …