The Present

Corporate blockchains. Blockchain investigation is now rapidly transitioning away from cryptocurrency to corporations thinking about all the use cases for the digital ledger technology. How it creates a distributed, decentralized opportunity to seek and to trace providence- all prior knowledge and movement of data around a product or service. A digital ledger, which allows for open source visibility of transactions and information of all kinds, has great applications for digital commerce and supply chain and is starting to make its way through corporate environments.

Examples were discussed of some of the most interesting use cases hitting the news today like Walmart building a supply chain blockchain that is being used to track romaine lettuce, which may not seem like a big deal, but it is a serious use case for food safety. Remember that some months back there was a salmonella outbreak with romaine lettuce and it took months to track down the central point of where that outbreak started. That shut down the whole romaine lettuce industry for a month which is a multi-million dollar industry. Now that they are tracking every point of the supply chain – from farm to store - on a blockchain, it can take seconds. These are huge efficiencies for corporations which are bringing in an extremely large influx of corporate interest.

Nestle also has a supply chain blockchain prototype right now for tracking milk. In particular, trying to show providence for a milk that came from ethical sources. If you can prove and show consumers a completely transparent tracking for the milk they buy, it increases the appeal, pricing and value for that product.

Corporations are exploring many ways to leverage this technology, including Facebook which announced that they are developing  their new Libra cryptocurrency with a network of major partners that include Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, STRIPE, Uber, and Lyft, to mention a few. So you can see this is very rapidly evolving technology from what some have seen as some weird, freakish, tech fad that only nerds, geeks and conspiracy theorists have used.

Regulatory trends. A warning was made clear at the Conference that it is important to understand where we are with legislation on blockchain, as it was stated that the U.S. has already been losing this race before it even began. This is of utmost concern as blockchain is a global phenomenon. Other countries that have embraced this technology are attracting talent and startups in this growing space. We are seeing some U.S. companies innovating with this technology already fleeing the states because of the uncertainty of the regulatory environment here.

The Future

There are 50 or so industries starting to deploy blockchain, including every major bank in the world. Many are all very new efforts, mainly existing as prototypes and are not production ready yet. This corporate activity and experimentation will increase exponentially as early innovators start showing practical applications as was reported previously.

Active engagement with legislation will be crucial as some states, like New York State, are already losing with restrictive legislation driving companies away, versus Wyoming which is actively attracting the technology. Recently BlockSpaces was proactively involved lobbying for reasonable legislation in Florida with Tallahassee passing Senate HR 1024 and Governor DeSantis putting forth a blockchain taskforce to give recommendations on how this technology can be used and best regulated to create and attract more businesses to the state of Florida. Florida is becoming a good model, unlike NY and California, on how the future needs leadership of taking the mantle of this and other technologies. What was recommended was that business leaders need to rally for more education and create many local and regional business initiatives to have the right kind of conversations and enable this technology to bloom.

Conclusion