In recent years technology connected items are becoming more popular as technology is starting to surround our daily life. Once considered as nerdy in a pejorative manner, slogans such as Artificial Intelligence or Augmented Reality are becoming more trendy and marketable. One of the examples is also Blockchain. Created in 1991 for digital timestamp and popularized from the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 (ICAEW), blockchain has been considered as one of the technologies that can revolutionize life as we know it. However is its influence as strong as portrayed or is it just an over-marketed buzzword?
To establish the promise of emerging technology Gartner has came up with an amazing tool which is Hype Cycle. It shows at what step of development given technology is at a given point of time from Innovation Trigger to Plateau of Productivity. In 2018 Blockchain was at the end of the Peak of Inflated Expectations (Gartner, 2018). Interestingly at the beginning of the 2018 “blockchain” has reached its peak in google searches across the world till today (probably because of the rocketing prices of Bitcoin in late 2017). According to the Gartner report in 2021 it will reach the phase Trough of Disillusionment and is planning to grow in the next few years (Leow, 2018). In 2025 it is projected to reach business value of $176 billion and $3.1 trillion by 2030 worldwide.
Although first applications have been widely used in the financial sector, nowadays it is believed that blockchain can be adapted in numerous aspects of our daily life. Few of them are as follows:
- Supply Chain management – recording and traceability of whole supply chains
- Governance – digital voting
- FinTech – fully digital banks
- Art and Music – royalties and ownership of art
It is safe to say that blockchain may reach its already high expectations. However it is quite different than most of the technologies that can be called disruptive. Although it has been used worldwide for the last 10 years it is still being developed. It is believed that the blockchain revolution should not be compared with any disruptive technology but with the introduction of the Internet. It changed everyone’s life significantly and found application in almost every aspect of our life but it took some time. And the same may happen with blockchain. Thus in next 10-20 years we might see different world and the huge part of this difference might be caused by blockchain.
Source:
Gartner (2018), 5 Trends Emerge in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2018 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/5-trends-emerge-in-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2018
Adrian Leow, Avivah Litan, Richard Hunter, Rajesh Kandaswamy, Dave Aron, Andrew Stevens (2018). Predicts 2019: Blockchain Business
ICAEW (n.d.) https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/blockchain/blockchain-articles/what-is-blockchain/history
