Best emerging tech of 2020: iExec Year Review #2
One observation we can make from the year 2020, is that this has been the year that has crystallized the need for digital transformation. Even if for years many companies have voiced their strategy to pave the way for digital transformation, clearly 2020 has emphasized who has been efficient.
After the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the organization of companies, some tech trends have won the 2020 race. We’ll give a short summary of these new tech trends and what role iExec has in these.
If you have downloaded a tracking app, raise your hand. Now, by ‘tracking app’, we mean an official one to track COVID-19 contact cases, not all the apps you use daily that also track our life in a way, with our vague consent. So if you have downloaded a covid tracking app and used it, raise your hands? Even fewer people. Why? We won’t go too deep into the ethical side, but from a tech perspective, clearly, the privacy issue is a huge constraint.
AI seems to be the new tech bringing us any hope of understanding enormous data sets, so huge and complex that even big data scientists are pulling their hair out. Although the field of AI is strengthening every day, we are also seeing a further increase in the resistance of citizens and companies to share their data. We now must work on secure and reassuring solutions addressing the upstream movement stage of data generation. No AI model will be satisfying if we can’t feed it with valuable and certified large data sets.
That is where a revolutionary but still less mainstream new technology has become the obsession of big corporates: Zero Trust. Zero Trust is not just one technology. It is a framework of technologies allowing companies to design products where customers do not need to agree through a contractual trust, but where customers use services that are, by design, respecting their privacy with a state of the art level of security.
As mentioned, Zero Trust isn’t just one technology, but a general framework. Let’s list the 5 best new tech trends for 2020 and see which one might play a role in this Zero Trust framework. The following articles have ranked 5G, AI, Blockchain, IoT and Robotics as key technologies for 2020:
The global research firm, Gartner, recently outlined its top strategic technologies. Both ‘Distributed Computing’ and ‘Privacy-Enhancing Computation’ made it onto the trends list for 2021.
Sound familiar? Let’s take a look back at the demo iExec has showcased at Mobile World Congress 2019, at the Intel® booth. In short, it is not just a demo proving we can align with a lot of buzz words, it is an illustration of how 2 delivery robots can use 5G to request help thanks to a blockchain-based marketplace. And here, the Zero trust approach lives through 1. hardware encryption, 2. blockchain, and 3. secure off-chain computing.
So if this tech is taking the lead in the non-blockchain world, what about the blockchain world? A lot has happened in 2020. On the structural side, layer 2 technologies are becoming further tested and increasingly efficient. More benchmarks are compared to illustrate their benefits and limits. On the application side, DeFi has excited a lot of crypto fans. Was it thanks to its potential or thanks to Japanese cuisine inspired projects going to the moon?
The coming years will answer this question. But it is clear that DeFi has created interest from a wide range of profiles including governments and financial institutions. Here, iExec has again illustrated how its stack will help this sector. iExec went further in receiving regulatory approval, from AMF, the french SEC, for its Enterprise marketplace Token Swap Offering. This first world-first approval is not just a great indicator that places the decentralized scene closer to the classic industries, but it also has a strong position in the complex but key trend of RegTech. The technologies of Regulation will surely frame a lot of our hopes and uses in our increasingly digital life over the coming years.
So in summary, iExec has been blessed to have invested its time and resources in solutions proving to be more needed to a wide range of actors. 2020 has been an intense year for a lot of industries, and we are thrilled to start in 2021, ready to conquer clients and growing markets.
Best Events of 2020 — iExec Year Review #1:
Best Collaborations of 2020 — iExec Year Review #3:
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