Spending Bitcoin at Whole Foods

A Look At Blockchain Adoption

Blockchain is enabling a fundamental shift in how technology is deployed across a wide range of industries. It is increasingly clear that enterprises are moving from exploring blockchain and “blockchain tourism” towards practical business applications. Most of the work has gone into building an under the hood infrastructure that can enable traditional applications to transition and compete in this space. Arguably, financial institutions, traditional laggards stung by the rise of new generation fintech apps, were amongst the first to recognize the importance of blockchain.

Back in 2016, JP Morgan had already started building Quorum, a purpose built blockchain for the financial industry. It is no accident therefore that this week Microsoft and JP Morgan announced a strategic partnership to drive enterprise application of the platform. Forward thinking companies have already begun to build a blockchain based payments into their strategic roadmaps. The Brave and Opera browsers are great examples of how companies are onboarding a new generation of users, integrating crypto payments and wallets that allow access to products and services built on a blockchain first principle. Indeed, a recent Deloitte survey found that executives across the board are now focused on the question, “How can we make blockchain technology work for us?”

The real barriers to adoption seem to be a lack of in-house skillset in understanding the scope of the technology and implementation without completely disrupting the existing legacy framework. Executives are seemingly unable to grasp the business impact of processes being modified and replaced by blockchain. How do these variations percolate through functional departments, company wide operations and finally how the industry is being reshaped and reimagined. Again, the financial sector provides some cues: companies like Flexa, a payments processing startup, are rewriting the rules and shifting the competitive landscape by allowing major retailers to accept crypto payments (see below). These emerging companies are likely to fuel the innovation cycle for many years to come while coexisting with the larger enterprises.

Companies like Ernst & Young and Microsoft are both fundamentally large conservative organizations. So the fact that they’re both embracing this amorphous concept of decentralization is quite important as a tipping point. — Yorke Rhodes, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Blockchain

This is in line with the the Deloitte survey which found that the top value drivers for blockchain by a wide margin were new business models and a lower risk

The new business models and value chains being created vary widely along the industry and function where the technology is applied. Hence, it is imperative for executives to stay on top of the rapidly evolving landscape. Executives need to quickly triangulate between the merits of the technology, their own business models and the regulatory landscape that they may encounter as they race towards mass deployment.

In some other significant news form the world this week:

Retail | You Can Now ‘Spedn’ Bitcoin at GameStop, Barnes & Noble and More: the payment processing startup Flexa announced the release of its new custodial crypto wallet SPEDN, which allows users to spend bitcoin, ethereum, bitcoin cash or GUSD at a variety of brick-and-mortar retailers. Although the merchants receive fiat in the end, the partnership enables new possibilities for people looking to spend crypto as easily as they might use Apple Pay. Flexa co-founder Trevor Filter told CoinDesk the wallet app works at Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, Express, Lowe’s, GameStop, Office Depot, Regal Cinemas and Jamba Juice, just to name a few. [… Read More on Coindesk]

The Flexa network is going to be open source so if you’re a merchant anywhere you can integrate to use their network, even without necessarily interacting with the Flexa team directly. This is going to be the first step toward the future of how we transact value.

— Sarah Olsen, head of business development at Gemini

Originally published at https://proteum.substack.com.