While much of the past focus has been on blockchain as a nascent and growing technology, in the last few years it has undergone a transition to a more mature industry focused on use cases.
This is the view of Muneeb Shah (Director, Technology Consulting at Ernst & Young) who was speaking on the sidelines of the recent London Blockchain Conference. Shah has over 17 years of experience in payments and cash management with the last six years being focused on blockchain and its application, both as a professional advisor and as an industry practitioner.
‘The challenge is not about technology only, he said. ‘Sometimes we tend to think about blockchain and the nacency of the technology itself, whether it’s mature enough, etc. But over the last few years, we have seen that transition technology has matured and there are use cases which are foremost now at production-grade maturity.
‘’The biggest challenge is about the ecosystem and adoption and the minimum viable ecosystem to sustain a particular use case on the platform. There are also some challenges concerning regulatory maturity backing some of these use cases.’
A maturing industry focusing on use cases
Shah noted that he and his team have often looked at use cases in the past, whereas enterprises and organisations have historically just looked at blockchain as a technology.
‘And I think that the industry as a whole has moved to that level now where we are looking at use cases as the basic building block, not just in terms of what the technology brings to the table.’
‘So our view and our advice to our clients has always been, let’s look at the use cases first. Let’s understand what that use case needs from an underlying text standpoint. Does it merit using a blockchain? And if yes, what type of blockchain is best suited? I think that should be the key.’
Shah noted that this transition had taken place over the last five to six years, with blockchain seeing significant maturation from a technical standpoint. ‘We have now moved to a world where we are talking about seamless interoperability. We are talking about privacy, we are talking about high scalability. All the key elements that a technology platform would need to provide for enterprise use cases.’
Looking forward
Despite the growth shown in the last few years, Shah noted that there are still some challenges around ecosystem development and regulation. ‘We need to see a little bit more protectiveness from regulators in terms of encouraging the use of the technology and creating innovation. And that has already started happening.’
‘We are now seeing regulators coming up with distributed ledger-orientated sandboxes where they are encouraging participants to use cases, for example, on bonds, securities, carbon emissions and whatnot.’
‘I think we need more of that globally and we also need a fully based regulatory sort of framework in terms of how digital assets and blockchain can manifest in future,’ he said.
