Many of the big organizations and enterprise are looking forward towards the development of private blockchain systems. But will it be relevant to the development of Blockchain technology in future?

INTRODUCTION

It’s very important to understand an enterprise’s approach to blockchain technology as it helps in painting a more accurate picture of how the blockchain space will look in the future.

If you also agree with the idea that blockchain networks have the potential to provide economic and financial value then you will likely agree that businesses will indirectly or directly be either competing with or leveraging the technology at some point, and when and how they do so will have a significant impact on the future of the blockchain technology.

ANALOGY

Thus, the intention of this article is to draw on a historical instance of how enterprises approach the adoption of emerging technology (the Internet in the early ’90s) to anticipate their approach to blockchain space and briefly discuss possible implications as a whole.

I see a strong analogy between the emergence of the Intranet from the Internet in the former’s early days and the enterprise-driven divergence of permissioned blockchains from public ones.

If we look back in time when Internet entered the world stage as the newest disruptive technology it was perceived by businesses as a highly-risky pursuit owing to the technology not being mature enough to justify its use similar to how enterprises the public blockchains in this era.

ACTIONS TAKEN BY ENTERPRISES

In the response to each other, the Enterprise’s have been developing and implementing sandboxed versions of the immature technology, which makes sense from the perspective of the enterprises because by doing so they can utilize the technology in a form that sticks to the strict standards to which businesses are accountable.

By the comparison of the success between the two implementations of global communication technology, I don’t have to provide much of a defence in saying that the Internet was massively more successful (although the intranet is actually still used today, most often it is used to host a company’s internal proprietary information), and I believe businesses will undergo a similar change towards public decentralized networks in the near future.

ISSUES WITH PUBLIC BLOCKCHAIN

The strong reasons why enterprises and organizations are avoiding blockchain technology today are related to the technical and functional limitations public blockchains face today; public blockchain platforms are mostly unregulated, also the data related to transactions and logic linked to smart-contract is public, transaction throughout is insufficient, and participation in the network is unrestricted.

But, significant progress is visible on all those fronts, and once they are solved, there won’t be any legitimate reason for enterprises to avoid public chains, also it provides the added benefits of better security and interconnectedness.

While I can say from experience that public blockchains are generally a ‘no-no’ for enterprises today, we can see evidence that enterprises are looking forward to it as seen in the release of Nightfall codebase written for the public Ethereum blockchain in Ernst & Young’s release.