Trends in enterprise blockchain implementation
Analysis of industry pilots from the last 5 years
A little while ago, I published a post about the current 70+ industry-driven blockchain projects across industries — banking, big tech, automotive, pharma and all the rest. When I just recently updated the data, I pulled some quantitative statistics from it that I’d like to share together with my interpretation of the data.
The data set contains 145 enterprise blockchain-related announcements between 2014 and today. I used 4 categories to break down the data items: 1) pilots, 2) products (i.e. market offerings), 3) patents, and 4) other (non-specific) items. Excluding these other items, there are 126 remaining, 85 of which are about industry pilots. I further categorized the pilots using the use case framework from one of my other posts.
There are a couple of observations that can be drawn from the data:
- Comprising banking and insurance, the financial services industry has been the most active, working on a lot of pilots, collecting patents, and bringing products to market such as R3 Corda.
- As a group, industries involved in products manufacturing & distribution are equally active though, comprising travel & transportation, retails, automotive, pharma, and chemicals.
- The technology and telecom industry have been focussing on creating blockchain products. They’ve been collecting patents as part of the development process, and the technology industry started to bring products to market.
- The most prominent enterprise use case is still payment, but data sharing and asset tracking are of high importance as well.
- The distinction seems to go along industry boundaries; financial services focus on payments, products manufacturing & distribution focus on data sharing and asset tracking.
- There is a steady year-over-year increase. 2018 will likely set a new record for enterprise blockchain projects.
- Investigation of payment use cases seems to be on the decline, while data sharing and asset tracking are clearly on the rise.
- Activities in the banking industry seem to be declining, even though they dominated earlier years.
- Just last year, almost all industries started to investigate blockchain projects.
There is clearly momentum picking up for enterprise blockchain solutions across industries, but companies in products manufacturing & distributing industries seem to become the main drivers, surpassing financial services.
They are also looking into newer use cases, and with first productive solutions such as from Maersk or IBM/Carrefour coming to market, mass enterprise adoption will most likely arrive rather sooner that later.
