In the January of 2009 a mysterious figure called Satoshi Nakamoto launched a virtual currency named Bitcoin that functioned around a “proof of work chain”. It was a rallying point against the global financial meltdown caused by unscrupulous institutions and cryptocurrencies rose to peaks and plumbed depths though the technology holding it up came to roost as blockchain technology.
Nobody knew enough about blockchain to the point where even the first Bitcoin transactions took close to 12 months to fructify. The ecosystem was limited to a handful of geeks and developers who probably had just an inkling of how this phenomenon could take over other applications across the entire business operations and management firmament.
The journey through the decade revolved largely around the cryptocurrency experiments, but the distributed ledger technology began gaining momentum in the world of FinTech. For close to five years now, banks and financial institutions have used it for a variety of functions – from smart contracting to simplification of loan applications.
Jonathan Johnson of TechCrunch.com believes that 2020 could be a blockbuster year for blockchain development that will see the technology “begin to take its biggest, most world-changing steps yet.” The build-up began a few years ago as industries went into research mode to figure out how effective blockchain would be in tackling supply chains and manufacturing processes and protocols.
Huge retailers like Walmart and fast food companies like McDonalds now use blockchain to source materials and food. Brazil recently hired IBM to create a blockchain system that would manage the country’s birth and death record system, which had been rife with abuse for decades. There will be many more such use cases of blockchain to be followed in the coming decade.
Experts globally believe that the next decade is where blockchain would come of age as software tools existing in traditional stacks would be created and adopted at decentralized software development stacks. It would also bring forth results of open source projects using hyper-ledger as more users would squeeze their way in causing new integrations that may produce astounding results.
With China openly declaring that it would go after blockchain technology as it presented just the opportunity that it was looking for to expand its hegemony over the world economy, it remains to be seen where the United States and its allies go as cryptocurrencies aren’t yet governed by clear guidelines in the region.
With data privacy gaining importance, there could be a blockchain play even in the cloud as current experiments around these areas may bear fruit in the coming decade.
In the words of Business Achievers, blockchain would be commonplace in the coming decade where we will all have our own dedicated blockchain IDs and by 2030 or sooner there may be more people with blockchain identities – both at the individual level and with their physical and virtual assets.