Friends in High Places: 4 Global Corporations and Their New Blockchain Apps

At first written off by serious investors as a risky fad, crypto is finding friends in high places — among them, Samsung, Starbucks, GE, and Microsoft.

Blockchain technology emerged just 10 years ago as an outsider challenger to the established financial markets. The first cryptocurrency, christened Bitcoin by its mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto, appeared in 2008. Nakamoto envisioned it as an alternative to traditional currency that would allow the decentralized exchange of money directly between individuals. Since that time, the crypto market has exploded, amassing $245 billion in market capitalization.

Now, crypto is catching the eye of big business. In a recent survey of 600 executives from 15 countries, 84% said that they are either actively using blockchain or planning to adopt it in the future. At the same time, industry giants are rolling out blockchain applications that further validate blockchain as a value-driving business tool. In this article, we’ll take a look at four corporations that have unveiled blockchain plans this spring.

Pumpkin spice blockchain

Starbucks, one of the first big-name coffee shops to sell fairly traded coffee, touts its commitment to “fairly sourcing” all its harvests. Now, the company is rolling out an app that will let it back up those claims by giving customers access to its distributed crypto ledgers.

Starbucks currently buys beans from over 380,000 coffee farms across South America, Africa, and Asia. Traditionally, sourcing on this scale has posed a problem for companies looking to ensure transparency and ethical trading.

Distributed ledgers provide a solution. In early May, the coffee giant announced plans to track coffee harvests from soil to cup using blockchain technology. They will then share that information with customers via a mobile app, which they developed using Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain service.
According to Starbucks, shareholders got a peek at the new app in March; an official release date has yet to be announced.

Microsoft goes crypto

Microsoft, power player of personal and business computing, is contending for a place in the blockchain industry, as well. The company’s first foray into blockchain came last year with Azure Blockchain Workbench, which allows developers to configure blockchain apps on a pre-configured network. Now, organizations have access to a fully managed blockchain service via the aptly named Azure Blockchain Service. Microsoft released the much-awaited service in May, which will make blockchain more widely accessible for businesses.

Big names in business have already been using other Azure blockchain services. Starbucks is one of them; meanwhile, GE Aviation used Azure to develop its own blockchain supply chain tracking system, which it released on May 12.

With GE Aviation accounting for about 60% global jet engine shipments, the move stands to set a new norm for supply chain tracking in the industry.

At the same time, Microsoft itself is putting blockchain to use with a decentralized identification system, released May 13. Ion was developed in response to the growing issue of securing users’ personal data, underscored in the previous year by scandals such as that surrounding Cambridge Analytics.
As users increasingly have the opportunity to log in to services through Google and Facebook, there are more and more opportunities for scammers and hackers to steal this high concentration of personal data through the intermediary server. Ion removes this vulnerability by confirming user identity through decentralized identifiers rather than a central database of data.

With more and more aspects of a person’s identity being recorded and saved on servers, data privacy has become a hot-button issue. Ion partially addresses these concerns, while at the same raising the bar for how personal data is handled and secured.

Blockchain on your smartphone

Smartphone manufacturers are also among those putting blockchain to use, with Samsung leading the charge. The South Korean company’s Galaxy 10, released in March of this year, is the world’s first smartphone to offer a built-in crypto wallet. Galaxy 10 users are able to access Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens (for more on the expansion of Etherium and ERC-20 trading, check out this article). The S10 will also feature several other blockchain applications, including Enjin, Cosmee, CryptoKitties, and CoinDuck.

Crypto features will also be made available on more budget-friendly models, Samsung announced in May, although the company is keeping details of the plans under wraps.

But crypto applications are just the tip of the blockchain iceberg — Samsung is developing its own Ethereum-based blockchain network and is considering extending those plans to include the development of an original cryptocurrency. The company’s plans could help push South Korea to join its neighbors in developing strong blockchain markets for investors.

JP Crypto

Crypto pioneers initially envisioned blockchain-based currencies as an alternative to traditional centralized banks. Yet that has not stopped those very banks from getting into the game for themselves. JPMorgan sent shockwaves through the financial community in February when it announced plans to launch JPM Coin, its very own cryptocurrency. The bank intends to use the new coinage to settle portions of its internal transactions, which amount to more than $6 trillion daily.

With the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies totaling only $244 billion, according to Coinmarket cap, the immediate impact of JPMorgan’s new transaction plan within the company itself will be comparatively small. Nonetheless, their eagerness to adopt crypto should give investors reason to be optimistic about the future of such currencies.

In fact, this is not the bank’s first step towards crypto. JPMorgan launched Quorum blockchain in 2016, and, partnered with ANZ and the Royal Bank of Canada, have been using it since 2017 to settle transactions between banks faster. Currently, more than 220 financial institutions use Quorum.
At the same time, other financial institutions are also leveraging blockchain via bonds and loans, among them France’s Societe Generale Group and Spain’s BVA. 50 more banks are testing Voltron, a financial application for blockchain trading created by tech company R3.

Next steps

Within a decade, crypto has matured from underground industry to changemaker, opening up very real opportunities for big-name companies to improve efficiency and data security. Professional services network PwC estimates that blockchain will constitute 10–20% of the global economy by 2030, with a value of $3 trillion. If the projects of Microsoft, Samsung, Starbucks, and GE are any indication, we can expect the value of blockchain to meet and even exceed these expectations.