7 Tough Legal Lessons for Crypto Entrepreneurs

It turns out, last year's mantra "make blockchain real" was little more than wishful thinking.

Instead of the increased efficiency, enterprises have encountered impractically slow transaction volumes; instead of a transparent world with ultimate accountability, companies holding sensitive customer data faced regulatory concerns.

Still, there's reason to believe the same rosy-colored forecast just might come true this year.

The reason for that optimism, it turns out, is that even if the blockchains didn't become real for businesses in 2017, they did become tangible in terms of technology. And now that the software has been built, those working close to development say live trials are just around the corner.

"All these experiments and proofs-of-concept were not done in a vacuum and they were not done for fun," said Charley Cooper, managing director of the R3 distributed ledger consortium, which has its own series of live applications in the final stages of launch.

He told CoinDesk: