Enthusiasm for blockchain technology that was likely to revolutionize and solve all problems in the world is fading among individuals quickly.

Blockchain, the prime technology that powers cryptocurrencies are getting its last sacrament in New York at the Consensus Invest conference where hundreds of true-believers of crypto gathered on Tuesday to discuss the latest trends in the still-embryonic digital assets market.

The blockchain technology records and verifies transactions and has been used by companies including Walmart Inc. and Microsoft Corp. however, after using it for a decade, they are of the view that it is slowly vanishing.

Meltem Demirors, a Chief Investment Officer of CoinShares Group, said, “Blockchain is dead” on the sidelines of the conference in Times Square. “After two, three years of spending a lot of money on this and a lot of investment dollars going into this, I think the bigger question as an investor is: What’s the scalable revenue model and is there equity value it created in these businesses? And arguably, the answer is: not yet.”

Pointing to early adapters including R3, Digital Asset Holdings and Chain, which Demirors says are pivoting into new business models she says, most of the companies that raised massive amounts of capital in 2016- 2017 to build the blockchain, they don’t exist anymore, or they’ve rotated to cryptocurrency and tokenization.

When cryptocurrencies caught fire in 2017-2018, firms – including cigar manufacturers and sports-bra makers –barged to cash in on the market’s love affair with the prime blockchain technology, often using the ledger as a remedy for deadstock returns. But the sudden thrust did not prevail for a long time, and many of them curbed loss as the price of Bitcoin and other digital assets subsequently crashed.

Data trends also show that blockchain has been losing its simmer continuously. In a significant retraction from prior years, the flow of cash into blockchain start-ups has dropped, according to data assembled by CB Insights. Businesses concentrating on the blockchain are on pace to draw $1.6 billion this year, $4.1 billion in 2018, according to the data, the firm said recently.

Digital Asset Data

Co-Founder and CEO, Mike Alfred said, “Enterprise blockchain, the idea that nowadays every company wants to have a blockchain might be temporarily on the ropes, but the blockchain is the base what makes the entire ecosystem work. Bitcoin’s blockchain has been in use for more than ten years without any rupture. 

In no way is that dead,” he further says, “The current state feels like fatigue, it feels like trading fatigue, it feels like a lot of people are tired because we’ve been in this space and everybody is waiting for the space to grow up and for good things to take place. And it’s taking longer than most people expected, but in no way does that mean space is dead.”

BitGo

CEO of the Provider of Custodian Services, Mike Belshe, said, “We haven’t seen clear emergence of a dominant, strong player for a non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency asset — something on the blockchain. Blockchain has a lot of promises to keep, but I think that blockchain’s been overhyped. Most people can’t answer the question of when do they use a blockchain and when do they use a database”.

Arca

Portfolio Manager at the Los Angeles-based asset manager, Hassan Bassiri, said on the sidelines of the conference, “In 2017- 2018 during boom-bust cycles, everyone thought that blockchain would be the solution to pretty much everything in terms of technological innovation, asset issuance, trading, etc. And slowly people have started realizing that blockchains are public ledgers and it’s not an efficient system.,” “Anything that needs efficiency or speed operating doesn’t belong on the blockchain. And it’s crypto, so everything goes through a hype cycle, and we sometimes put the cart in front of the horse,” He said.