The Power of Private Blockchains Is Beginning to Show

Cryptocurrency purists often dismiss private blockchains as overly expensive undertakings for projects that are better served with a traditional database.

Yet these distributed ledger solutions keep being rolled out by enterprises in various settings – mostly still in experimental phases, but, increasingly, with real money at stake. And while they fall short of the public blockchain ideals of censorship resistance and permissionlessness, these contained, private experiments are extremely useful to the development of the overall blockchain industry.

While crypto investors lick their wounds in a bear market and developers plug away at scalability fixes for public blockchains, we can learn a great deal from how economic actors behave in these controlled situations where transactions involving multiple non-trusting parties are collectively recorded in a shared ledger.

One example came last month, with a first-of-its-kind blockchain bond issuance by the World Bank. In partnership with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the international development institution used a private Ethereum blockchain to sell a two-year bond worth 110 million Australian dollars ($79 million) to seven investors.

This was hardly the disintermediated, peer-to-peer securities sale that crypto finance disrupters dream of – the Commonwealth Bank played the role of dealer, essentially that of an underwriter. And the two institutions were the only ones running nodes, of which there were just four in total.

Read more here: https://www.coindesk.com/the-power-of-private-blockchains-is-beginning-to-show/