The Blockchain Ecosystem

As a person with extensive enterprise application experience, I came to blockchain looking to understand the current state of the blockchain-based application base – both for building these applications and for investing in a purpose-built application.

What I found made it very difficult to accomplish that goal. There is a tangle of virtual currencies, early stage ideas with only a white paper or a website, consortiums attempting to drive a specific market, groups trying to create open or proprietary blockchain platforms, organizations trying to create a defacto token via an initial coin offering (ICO), companies working on a specific domain where they believe blockchain-based systems can improve outcomes, and many other permutations.

I know many are like me and want to know which blockchain platforms or applications are currently in the marketplace: “What’s the ecosystem look like and how can I plug myself in?”

The charts below show my initial attempt to categorize the blockchain ecosystem. It does not have every blockchain project, company, or group out there. I decided to publish an initial view for folks to start using, comment on different grouping that will help them, allow these organiztions to let me know if my classification meets what they are trying to do, and generally get the dialog going.

Using the Charts

These next few paragraphs explain my groupings. Feel free to skip over them if not as interested in that level of understanding.

As I started collecting all these different solutions, I started first to segment them as platform based or industry specific. Platform-based in that the solution is general purpose for building your specific use case. Industry Specific in that the solution is meant to address a specific use case and can be deployed with no/minimal customization needed.

I quickly realized that there are cross industry solutions for storage, content management, currencies, predication markets, and identity management which is why those groups get their own page.

I also realized that the set of Ethereum solutions is already an ecosystem itself hence why it gets its own page. Generally, I included something on this page if its main goal is to support the Ethereum platform. The last two charts are really industry specific solutions being brought to market. No surprise that financial solutions lead the way.

Since this is early on the maturity curve, I have a number of whitepaper, alpha and beta companies on this list. My intent over time is to start classifying based on real life adoption possibilities. I’ve included them for now to aid in understanding the current marketplace thinking.

Blockchain Ecosystem Charts

Going Forward

I do intend to update this on a regular basis so welcome your comments and additional or new members of the blockchain ecosystem. Already a number have popped up for the next version (e.g. Sweetbridge, Populous, Foreground, QTUM, Peernova, Parity Technologies).
Look forward to making blockchain real with you.

Tom Klein
[email protected]