Foundational technologies like blockchain take decades to make a massive impact on society and economy. However, if you had read the news, you would not have believed it. The hype machine was real, and the message was that the technology would not go through a natural cycle of development. Instead, it will rapidly disrupt everything. This continuous news cycle declared that blockchain will solve problems in finance, supply chain, election, insurance, and more. The blockchain will soon drive the global economy, and the disruption was well underway.
In 2017 and 2018, blockchain startups raised billions from crypto millionaires, venture capitalists, and other institutional investors via initial coin offerings. The market valued 1-year-old blockchain protocols of several billion dollars, without a single practical use case. Executives were ready to pay thousands of dollars to attend conferences to understand what this new technology was about. Conferences charged accordingly to listen to “so-called” investors because they had a few million dollars in their crypto wallets. These conferences featured blockchain experts, who cannot explain with a straight face what a smart contract was. However, hype is not all that bad because reality always sets in thereafter. In 2019, when projects failed, the market pushed scammers out in the open. Investors who poured billions on protocols began pushing for implementation of real-world use cases. The new paradigm steered the blockchain technology to a proper course of true innovation and scaling.
In 2020 people started talking about scaling blockchain applications. Use cases that could scale widely became important for startups and investors. The paradigm of blockchain as being a trustless machine changed to a trust machine. It is a trust at industrial scale. The true potential of blockchain is to reduce information asymmetry between parties using immutable ledgers anchored on an open network that operates globally using an open protocol.
Blockchain is a revolutionary technology, and, like other revolutionary technologies, it will not disrupt existing business models but ignore them and create innovative ones we have not seen before. I describe these innovative business models later in the book. These innovative business models will challenge the existing ones and even become a viable alternative, the same way cryptocurrency is challenging traditional finance.
In due course, existing businesses, especially the smart ones, will grow and start adopting blockchain (along with other nascent technologies) because they will want to stay relevant and transform. This book provides you with three key ingredients to implement blockchain and take part in the new economy by helping understand the fundamental components of blockchain, risks, and challenges of innovative business models, and ways to take part in the blockchain world. After reading the book, you’ll be able to evangelize the use of blockchain within your organization and with your customers, design breakthrough and innovative business models, and analyze risks and opportunities—legal, administrative, and technical.