The Blockhain Ecosystem - November 2017

Last month I indicated I would share a couple use case scenarios you can implement right now. While these basic use cases may not set the world on fire, they will get you going with “real” blockchain and accelerate your learning so it becomes possible to adopt more wide-ranging and valuable ones.

Already, there are many blockchain-based (digital) storage providers. Their initial advantage over existing on-site storage or cloud based storage is reduced costs of up to 10x over AWS. There are also benefits for increased uptime from their decentralized nature. A key learning opportunity is deploying your unused storage on these chains to investigate blockchain-based incentive systems and the integrating a blockchain based application with existing systems. At this stage, you don’t want to be putting high profile data on the chains. The best possibilities are with data that has low individual value (such as IOT) or data which is currently being deleted on a regular basis (such as historical customer on-line data). See the final chart below for the logos.

Another initial opportunity, more a pattern than a use case, is to create a simple business network using public data, an organization’s own data, and an end user that will benefit from events based on the combination of the data. Last month I mentioned fizzy.axa, which leverages publicly available flight delay data. It’s a significant improvement over existing flight insurance by shortening the delay time for payout from 6 to 2 hours and avoiding the manual work of claiming by using a smart contract.

In each of these scenarios, your organization can create a valuable blockchain based application while avoiding the challenge of developing a full-scale business network right now.

The marketplace continues to generate new ideas and companies. This month, I’ve even added another industry, Transportation. Next time, I’ll be subsetting all the logos in Finance since one with an insurance focus has different plans than one in banking or one in financial markets. And if you want even more insight, bookmark www.icoalert.com to keep up with all the existing and planned ICOs since a good number of blockchain startups are doing ICOs.

More recently uncovered organizations to be added to the next month’s post are: Metaverse, Exscudo, Mesh, and Enigma. Always looking for more, so feel free to send me your favorite blockchain company not represented here and I’ll add them. If you’d like a fully hyperlinked version of these charts, send me an email at the address below.

Until next time…

Tom Klein
[email protected]