“Blockchain, the technology underpinning bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, for years has been viewed by some companies as a way to drive industry-transforming projects, among them the tracking of assets through complex supply chains,” according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Blockchain Fails to Gain Traction in the Enterprise.”
“So far that hasn’t happened.”
Blockchain technologies first came to light in 2008 as the architecture underpinning bitcoin, the best known, most valuable, and most widely held cryptocurrency. Over the years, blockchain has evolved in two major directions. One continues to focus on blockchain as the underlying platform for bitcoin, as well as for the large number of cryptocurrencies, digital tokens, and other crypto assets that have since been created. The other focuses on blockchain as a distributed data platform for collaborative applications involving multiple institutions, such as supply chains, financial services and healthcare systems.
Blockchain made its first appearance in Gartner’s yearly hype cycles in 2016. Despite its being at an early and immature stage, many of its proponents believed that enterprise blockchain platforms were just around the corner, and so it quickly rose to the peak of inflated expectations. But as reality set in, expectations started sliding down in 2021, and by 2022 blockchain platforms had reached the bottom of the trough of disillusionment.
As years go, 2022 was a very tough one for blockchains in general. In the crypto space, bitcoin and most other crypto assets have lost a very large chunk of their value, and numerous crypto companies have collapsed, most prominently FTX. In the enterprise, a number of ventures went belly up. we.trade, a blockchain-based trade finance, shut its operations in June after running out of cash. A few months later, the Australian Securities Exchange canceled its much-delayed blockchain-based clearing system. Most prominently, in late November TradeLens announced that it was discontinuing its blockchain-based global trade platform. Other enterprise blockchain projects, like Walmart’s food traceability application, still carry on but their uptake and progress have been slower than anticipated.
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