Single Firms Built 71% of Live Blockchains, Says Cambridge Report

The Global Enterprise Blockchain Benchmarking Study was recently released by the CCAF and it gives us a view of the broader cryptocurrency industry.

The State of the Industry at a Glance

In total, the CCAF spoke to more than 160 company respondents and looked at some 67 live networks. Here’s some of what they found.

• Out of 67 live blockchains, a single company was responsible for founding 71% of them.
• Only 22% or so of existing live networks were consortium-led. The remaining 7% were government-led.
• Around 43% of surveyed live blockchain networks were in the financial service sector.
• Among those polled, most said that the leading use-case was in supply chain tracking (19%). Other use-cases mentioned include trading (15%), certification (10%), and payments (7%).

Overall, the report seems to confirm that most are expecting spending on these projects to continue to increase. For example, 52% of respondents say they are planning significant spending increases. Another 26% planned a ‘smaller rise,’ and, most notably, only 4% planned to cut spending. That’s good news for the blockchain industry as a whole. Yet, the main point of concern in the report is that most of these networks seem to be led by individual companies rather than large institutions. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but it may indicate that some larger conglomerates in the banking world are still slow to adopt DLT technologies. The report does mention, however, that consortium-led networks may be underrepresented as of now due to most of them still being in development.

A Period of Building in the Blockchain World

Still, the numbers speak for themselves. Whereas Q4 2018 saw 15 new enterprise blockchain deployments with live networks released, Q2 2019 only saw 5. This does not indicate that the hype is dying down necessarily, but we may be in a ‘building’ period before the next major uptick in public interest. Digging through the report seems to provide us with more positive takeaways than expected. Moreover, in the spirit of decentralization, it probably is better than single companies are creating these networks anyway since consortiums always seem to be psuedo-centralized. Did any of the information in Cambridge Center of Alternative Finance’s new report surprise you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below. 

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