This book lays the foundations of blockchain and the innovative business models that come with industrialization of trust or trust at scale. It provides the c-suite and senior executives with a playbook to help them embark on a journey to implement blockchain solutions in their operations and, on the way, future-proof their products and offerings. Blockchain is so nascent that there are few reference implementations, best practices, guidebooks, and best sellers to help us make those decisions.
I am constantly learning from dialogues with my peers, blog posts, and conferences where individuals debate about everything from protocols, smart contracts, currency predictions, and issues and challenges that lie ahead. This book is a collection of what I know and have experienced as a blockchain evangelist, consultant, and cofounder of a blockchain startup building a platform to solve one of the most difficult sectors—logistics and supply chain. It is difficult to build a platform on nascent blockchain technology for a traditional industry of moving freight because the platform must work for now and not a decade into the future. I am sure you’ll experience the same.
It is abundantly clear that blockchain will disrupt fundamental components of trade and governance. The impact of such disruption is still being analyzed and debated. Blockchain is an exponential innovation that takes years and decades to unfold its true potential. After decades of centralization of services provided to us, the future of decentralization is here. However, it would be naïve to think everything will be decentralized or needs to be. Most businesses will be built on top of decentralized services and will exercise a certain measure of control over their institutions.
In the next few decades, as Fabrizio Romano Genovese wrote in “Poetry of Blockchain….”, “… blockchain poetry will eventually die, take its natural course like many other technologies that came before us.”1 But we have a chance to delay the process, to spreserve it longer, and use it to benefit the future generations as much as we can.
Much work needs to be done to harness the power of blockchain for the benefit of future generations, and we are just getting started. Reducing the cost of trust is not trivial. That is one reason I think blockchain will follow an evolutionary path over decades. We are gradually preparing to thin the layer of trust that sits heavily between institutions and processes.
Until blockchain, we needed those thick layers of trust to facilitate commerce and economy. Those layers of trust reduced friction between parties. In return, entities who provided trust figured out that they could get away with overvaluing themselves. Intermediaries, regulators, standardized protocols, and so forth provided trust to businesses. Blockchain will not remove those “traditional” methods of trust. It will ignore them.
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1 F.R. Genovese. January 4, 2019. “The Poetry of Blockchain – A Celebration of Lateral Thinking,” Medium Corporation. https://blog.statebox.org/the-poetry-of-blockchain-a-celebration-of-lateral-thinking-ee43c6e261a6.