Making The Next Moves With Blockchain

For a technology that’s still in its comparative youth, blockchain has become incredibly influential, incredibly quickly. In August, the World Economic Forum released a report calling blockchain technology a ‘mega-trend’ that will shape society in the next decade. Indeed, the WEF predicts that blockchains could store as much as 10% of global GDP by 2027.
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To review: blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that uses specialized algorithms to ensure that transactions are valid and authentic and is based on a decentralized architecture and protected by powerful digital encryption. As such, blockchain can replace trusted third parties, like banks, in guaranteeing transactions and coordinating agreement among parties. Although it originated as the underlying technology for the digital currency Bitcoin, it is now widely recognized that its disruptive potential applies far beyond currency. In fact, blockchain is relevant to all industries and for any transactions that must be secure and verifiable. It is a completely novel architecture for business and a foundation for building a new generation of transactional applications.

This post was published at Forbes on NOV 14, 2016.