Odaily Frontline | Blockchain Predictions Report 2021: Going Mainstream Through Enterprise Adoption

念银思唐

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2020-11-07 17:34 (UTC+8)

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The report predicts that 30% of the world's blockchain projects will be put into production in the next year.

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The report predicts that 30% of the world's blockchain projects will be put into production in the next year.

This article comes fromCointelegraphby RACHEL WOLFSON

Odaily Translator |

American market research firm Forrester recently released its predictions for blockchain in 2021. The report reveals some interesting findings, pointing to 2020 as a big year for growth in the enterprise blockchain and distributed ledger technology space.

Forrester’s principal analyst and co-author of the report, Martha Bennet, told Cointelegraph that the firm’s blockchain predictions are based on inflection points that show clear changes, rather than a continuation of trends. For example, the report predicts that 30 percent of blockchain projects globally will be in production within the next year. This is partly due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's not just about requiring fewer people to do certain tasks, it's about reducing time and freeing up liquidity. The key takeaway is that this is possible within the context of existing processes and operating models."

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Development "takes time"

While this may come to fruition, Bennet argues that longer-term strategic projects in financial services often revolve around potential changes in market structure and operating models. Many of these use cases will also require regulatory adjustments. “It takes time, resources and effort. This is the main reason why the volatility and uncertainty related to COVID has caused many banks to temporarily withdraw from some long-term DLT-related projects,” Bennet said.

The report also states that almost all projects planned to move from pilot to production in the next year will run on enterprise blockchain platforms leveraging the cloud. These will most likely include solutions from Alibaba, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, OneConnect and Oracle.

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Most Critical Technology Prediction: Zero-Knowledge Proofs

From a technology standpoint, Bennet mentioned that the most critical prediction listed in the report is the growing demand for zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). “Currently there are challenges with confidentiality in the progress of the project, which requires a ZKP,” she said. The report further outlines the problems that a ZKP might solve:

“For companies that don’t want to rely on existing encryption technology, the only options are to keep only hashes on-chain, or to use structures such as selective replication or private data collection. In many cases, existing technology cannot solve the problem. Exposure issues from metadata."

There has been a lot of progress in the field of ZKPs recently. For example, Ernst & Young is developing a ZKP project "Nightfall," a privacy software that will use ZKPs to enable private blockchain-based transactions. EY Global Blockchain Leader Paul Brody told Cointelegraph that the firm’s top priority for the coming year is making Nightfall and ZKPs more accessible to developers:

"The biggest challenge with using and deploying ZKPs is that they are much more complex than writing smart contracts without privacy. I would compare it to adding SSL and encryption to web pages in the early days - something most people don't understand when learning Solidity development It has been achieved, and now, it is not so easy to achieve."

Brody further noted that the work surrounding Nightfall is focused on increasing the privacy level of transactions by hiding metadata that might be inferred by analyzing network activity. While the product currently supports private transfers and payments under compliance, Brody explained that the company hopes to expand on this by creating new privacy tools. “If our work is done well, people will move from developing distributed applications (DApps) to developing ZApps (zero-knowledge applications),” he said.

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DeFi and public blockchain predictions

The Forrester report also predicts that decentralized finance (DeFi) will negatively impact the adoption of public blockchains. According to the report, enterprise technology leaders are now open to discussing the role of public blockchains. However, the rise of DeFi in 2020 has led to questionable activity on public networks like Ethereum. “This reconnects public blockchains with the wild west of cryptocurrencies and will continue to drive away compliance and risk-conscious decision makers,” the report states.

Kyle Thomas, CEO of Provide, an enterprise blockchain provider that works with SAP and Coca-Cola North America, thinks differently, telling Cointelegraph that organizations of all kinds will soon look at public blockchains like the internet: “As 'Enterprise DeFi' is becoming more and more a reality, and more and more people are paying attention to this space."

In line with Thomas, Kevin Feng, a network security expert at PwC and former chief operating officer of the enterprise blockchain company VeChain, also said that although the DeFi space may be similar to the IC0 boom in 2017, the difference is that DeFi showcases financial services. The power of smart contracts.