Throughout the last years, endless articles and research papers were published about blockchain and the’dispersed ledger’ technologies which have been keeping the tech audience actively engaged. But as the steam blows off, is there substance left in the theoretical uses of the blockchain technology?

YES.

In an OECD event about the blockchain technology, held in September, delegates discovered that there are more than 200 cases of this technology set up in public services globally. The illustrations supplied by Marcos Bonturi, the OECD’s manager for public governance, added Mongolia’s use of a blockchain to authenticate medicines (as a method to fight off the 40% of fake pharmaceuticals available in the nation),  and Italy’s system which monitors the academic qualifications.

Now that the online has the option to have transparent transactions, and which makes it impossible to change records already created, the blockchain technology has proved valuable in cryptocurrencies, in which they supply an indisputable record of possession.

And software is emerging in public agencies, stated Bonturi: a blockchain is assisting the homeless to access get public services in Texas, while in Ghana the government is working with private partners to construct digital territory registries. A blockchain-based property registry is currently working nicely in Estonia, he added, and states such as Sweden and Chile are expecting to adhere to a similar concept of the Baltic country.

We will see more developments in the near future, and according to a paper from OECD: “Digitisation is viewed as a new source of growth, efficiency and relevance in today’s increasingly digital world.”

By supplying much more transparency and traceability for the contents of trucks and boats coming at national boundaries, blockchain could enhance safety, tax earnings, record-keeping and efficacy, according to the paper.

However, there aren’t any cases of blockchain in performance on the planet’s boundaries: Boris Johnson’s discussion of “technological options” allowing the UK and Irish regulatory regimes to diverge without producing the demand for a physical boundary stays firmly in the area of science fiction.

Generally, however, talks of blockchain’s capabilities are more inclined to realistic projects. According to Barbara Ubaldi, the paper’s lead author and deputy head of reform of the public sector at the OECD in Paris, “We have moved past the hype”.

Blockchain moves past the hype

Barbara Ubaldi stated that the advancement in providing blockchain software in the public sector has come at a slow pace. There’s no solid evidence of development in several locations. Fundamental challenges are the “power construction in the public sector” and also an”urgent need” for closer cooperation with the private industry. Additional important barriers include a lack of high quality data, a demand for the production of shared standards, and inadequate interoperability between public sector IT systems.

According to the OECD paper, risk aversion is another barrier.

Two-thirds of the nations surveyed in an OECD study stated that they prioritise standardised options over programs built around business demands, with many nations preferring to utilize proven technologies instead of exploring untested options.

That risk aversion is evidenced by public bodies’ lack of assurance within the regulatory atmosphere. “Regulators are behind the curve” on establishing rules governing issues like the use of information and the security of citizens’ privacy, states Bonturi, asserting that lots of nations lack the type of regulatory framework needed for blockchain to progress past well-meaning but small pilot strategies. The states that may advance the quickest, Bonturi adds, are those who provide the “path of least resistance” with regard to regulatory hurdles.

How to move ahead

Nonetheless, there are bright spots in certain nations, providing useful courses for civil servants everywhere. The OECD report praises the debut from authorities such as Australia, Estonia, New Zealand and the UK of electronic marketplaces, which facilitate the procurement of innovative digital technology and the commissioning of small providers.

Considering that the 2014 launching of the UK Digital Marketplace, the OECD states it has observed over £4.3bn (US$5.5bn) value of contracts pass, with almost half of that going to small and midsize enterprises. This has been followed in the UK this season from the debut of SPARK, an innovation market that allows public business clients to access the newest technology.

Stronger cooperation with the private sector may also accelerate advancement. Chile, Panama and Latvia are among the nations that have encouraged public-private cooperation on pilot schemes analyzing emerging technologies. And Estonia has supplied a “sandbox” environment for tech businesses to work on solutions and applications.

To realise the entire potential of blockchain, universally-transparent structures and authorities might need to accept that lots of blockchain programs are best directed by sectoral bodies or private businesses. Lots of public business blockchain experiments have followed a centralised, government-led strategy, as shown by a recent analysis from the EU Joint Research Centre, together with officials claiming the majority of the decision-making abilities. But among the tech’s key advantages is its ability to give accurate, confirmed information to everybody involved within the field of action; and if they lack the ability to make decisions utilizing it, a lot of blockchain’s potential wouldn’t be unrealised.

The EU Joint Research Centre report contains an example of a Maltese authorities project, which had started in 2017, and was made to verify academic qualifications. The ‘Blockcerts’ permits the production, issuing, seeing, and confirmation of certificates via blockchain.

It enables easy integration with existing instructional record-keeping systems and offers complete ownership of the documents to users using wallets. Using this system will actually save money, as requirements to inspect certification copies or transcripts are no longer needed. This past year, Italy started using the identical ‘Diplome’ program on a bigger scale to validate academic qualifications.

Blockchain has an identity

The OECD centre’s report points out that the blockchain may be expanded to authenticate different kinds of identity and certification, noting that Malta is investigating its use to check the identity of refugees in public service delivery. The most important barrier to wider adoption, researchers say, is too little consistency between nations’ legislative and regulatory frameworks, which emerges from the growth of internationally-accepted blockchain identification systems.

So blockchain is starting to come across real programs in public service delivery. And these, of course, are those who best match the technology’s attributes: providing international visibility of transactions and agreements between people, blockchain can offer certainty and clarity for those active in a business — government bodies one of them.

Presently, states Ubaldi, blockchain’s biggest potential lies in identification affirmation. A fifth of the planet’s inhabitants, the OECD states, are still with no legal or formally recognised individuality. So the chances are obvious but do not believe the hype.

Considering the vast business opportunities blockchain offers, becoming mainstream is just a matter of time. In 2015, there were 5 million wallets. Only 3 years later, in 2019, the number of blockchain wallets surpassed 42 million. Over the past 11 years years, blockchain transformed the way companies conduct their business and how people prefer to do transactions. And with all these happening, mainstream adoption is still taking its time. But adoption will not happen on its own. Public people and industry leaders will be the ones to drive the mainstream adoption of blockchain. So who are the people influencing blockchain’s mainstream adoption and who are working tirelessly to build an operational blockchain ecosystem?

John McAfee

The creator of McAfee antivirus and cybersecurity tools, John McAfee believes that the blockchain will be adopted in mass just like it happened with the internet. The famous computer programmer has deep-rooted ties with cybersecurity, and it is understandable why he thinks so, considering that blockchain provides critical security options by decentralizing information and computational infrastructure resources.

Vitalik Buterin

Buterin is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of the Ethereum Network and Bitcoin Magazine.

Using as a platform Ethereum, programmers can construct a wide variety of decentralized software, called DApps. These DApps can operate successfully on the Ethereum network instead of using a centralized computer location. While its own mainstream adoption has not clicked yet, Ethereum is growing daily. Actually, Ethereum’s programmers are working tirelessly to solving present scalability challenges and planning potential transactions to both shared network and also proof-of-stake consensus protocol.

Charlie Lee

Lee is mainly known as the founder of Litecoin, which is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies. As Lee declared this year, he will enhance Litecoin’s fungibility and will address its privacy issues by adding confidential trades. Lee declared in an interview: “[I] … think for sure cryptocurrency will be one of the currencies that people will use; it will achieve mass adoption one day. The volatility will come down and things will be priced in cryptocurrencies.”

Andreas Antonopoulos

Antonopoulos, another person to add to the list when thinking about the people influencing blockchain’s mainstream adoption. Andreas Antonopoulos is a speaker, author of Mastering Bitcoin, The Internet of Money, and Mastering Ethereum, a programmer and an entrepreneur.

He represents a huge information source for Institutions,  blockchain business, researchers and incubators such as DAO Maker.

After his “Thoughts of the Future of Money” talk, during the Q&A session, someone asked the following question: “Which scalability options should the community adopt?” and Antonopolous replied, “That’s an easy one to answer: All of them.” He further explained that scalability problems don’t get solved, they only get “pushed further out,” and since the network expands, new forms of application and use-cases become visible to present new capacity challenges.

Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo is known for building Bit Gold, which is considered by some the precursor of Bitcoin. Szabo is a renowned computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer who developed the idea of Smart Contracts. 

Companies like Modium, Ambrosus and Chronicled are integrating Smart Contract using IoT to improve traceability. One example of such a smart contract happens when the sensor that monitors the temperature of meals in transit record their data to the blockchain. That’s when the smart contract is initiated and executes a payment to the provider.

Erik Voorhees

Voorhees is an American-Panamanian founder of Shapeshift. Erik Voorhees is also one of the top-recognized Bitcoin Entrepreneurs and Advocates. In a recent interview, he said:

“Mass adoption needs to be specified according to the specific use case. While we aren’t at mass adoption of any of these categories yet, we are certainly past the point of ‘mass adoption’ in at least a couple.”

Marvin Steinberg

Steinberg is one of the primary Security Token Offering (STO) specialists. Marvin Steinberg is the creator of SteinbergInvest, which owns various subsidiaries such as CPI Technologies, the only firm supplying white-label STO solutions. Currently, he is leading the $700 million Time Square tokenization project, which might significantly increase the adoption of tokenized securities.

Marc Andreessen

Andreessen is the co-founder and a partner of the famous venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz. Besides being a powerful advocate of both Bitcoin and blockchain, he is among those who consider that blockchain technology can assist realign incentives between users and platforms. Andreessen is an integral investor in several blockchain ventures. Actually, he has developed an industry-centric venture capital finance. In addition, he works as a key blockchain adviser to other institutions.

Jed McCaleb

Jed McCaleb is a developer and co-founder of Stellar Development Foundation. Stellar Foundation is a low-cost utility network. In fact, it employs an exceptional consensus protocol along with a set of reliable anchors, like banks and payment processors, to ease near-instantaneous and extremely affordable monetary trades on the Stellar blockchain system. This lets users swap and send money across international borders. Actually, it enables cost-effective micropayments.

Roger Ver

Roger Ver is also an American and one of the oldest investors in, and promoters of, Bitcoin. He is commonly called “Bitcoin Jesus” due to is devotion and constant support for its adoption. Actually, he utilizes his entrepreneurial spirit to preach the gospel to anyone who’d listen to financing early crypto startups. Ver invests in projects that build new crypto protocols and software.

Blockchain technology has the capability to alter the worldwide supply chain and enhance the speed and safety of tackling the flow of products at international boundaries. But researchers say a lot of questions still remain about how the transformation will occur.

Weidong “Larry” Shi, an associate professor of at the University of Houston stated:

“It’s an emerging technology. It’s evolving,”

This was stated in a paper, published in the International Journal of Production Research, which investigates the possible disturbance and assures that blockchain can secure the global flow of products and identifies differences between the private sector and governmental agencies that have to be addressed. The paper is funded by the University of Houston and led by its Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence.

Shi said this indicates that embracing blockchain to monitor the movement of products globally may benefit both business and agencies charged with ensuring the protection of cargo entering the United States. “It could move items through customs more quickly, and it would allow customs to focus its resources on the minority of cargo that needs closer scrutiny,” he said.

The paper is concentrated on six distribution chain “pain points”: traceability, dispute resolution, freight integrity and safety, supply chain digitalization, compliance, and stakeholder management and trust. And of course, the key challenges for mass adoption.

“The wide adoption of blockchain technology in the global SC (supply chain) market is still in its infancy,” they wrote. “Industry experts project that on average, it may take about six years for the widespread adoption of blockchain.”

According to Shi, one of the challenges is to decide which blockchain technology ought to be utilized. He forecasts which will be ascertained industry-by-industry and also the need for shared standards and applicable regulations and laws.

Widespread adoption may also need organizations to share some information with both governments of the nations by which the products pass, in addition to with their opponents. But the benefits could be considerable, from enhancing the capacity to confirm where products come from and what path they travelled to get to the end-user, to solving concerns about counterfeit solutions.

Blockchain would decrease fraud, Shi said. “The data can’t be changed. Everyone (along the supply chain) has a copy. You can add information, but you can’t change it.”

Three years ago, people didn’t know what blockchain was,” Shi said. “They thought it was bitcoin. Now they understand that it’s a technology.”

The investigators are working with both business and the national authorities, and Shi said they discovered high interest among business, including a couple of pilot projects employing blockchain technology. However, any alternative, he stated, should incorporate the demands and responsibilities of U.S. Customs and Border Protection so as to make sure it meets the objective of pre-clearing most freight before it enters a port. “It is a better way of sharing data, and a better picture of what is going on.”