Blockchain is a huge buzzword. Even now it’s still a vague concept which is hard to grasp, and many people don’t understand it. How blockchain can impact our day-to-day life? Blockchain can help to increase transparency in the supply chain and provide consumers proof of where the products are coming from. Blockchain can also help people digitally store physical documents and transfer them internationally. Another example, blockchain can help us get back control of our data and give access to whoever we want when we use tons of applications in this digital world. It seems like blockchain improves all these areas of our daily life. Why don’t you see blockchain in your everyday life yet? There are 6 reasons block blockchain adoption.  

Challenge 1: Consortium set-up and governance.  

In the supply chain, multiple companies get involved: production facility, logistics company, warehouse, retailer, and other companies. Blockchain can help them chase the product and increase the transparency by creating a digital memory. However, it is not easy for every company to make an agreement and adopt blockchain. There are lots of questions around here: who has the intellectual property, who governs upgrades in this software, and how we kick off misbehaved members or take on new members. 

Challenge 2: Every blockchain project is also a digital project. 

For now, many enterprises and governments are still stuck in digitization 1.0. If they want to get into the blockchain, the first thing they need to do is get rid of paper. However, in today’s world, we still heavily rely on the paper and block our next step to fully digital world. 

Challenge 3: Legacy systems are complex and hard to integrate with. 

If the enterprise moves to the next step. Great! Most of the enterprises store their data in mainstream ERP systems like Oracle, SAP, and other systems. The challenge is that blockchains were never designed to be integrated with those ERP systems. Blockchain needs to find ways to bridge the old world of legacy systems and the new world of blockchains. Also, in the legacy system, processes are tie to each other. Lots of processes are impacted when modifying one process in this system.  

Challenge 4: Regulation. 

Use digital blockchain-based vehicle lifecycle management as an example. A lot of parties involved in the digital registration of a vehicle such as the producer of your car, the bank you have insurance, and the police department. If you want to have a 360-degree view of your car, you need to go to each of these systems to get the data. Blockchain can help you solve this problem once those parties want to share and exchange their data, but each party has their regulations.  

Challenge 5: Immaturity of blockchain technology. 

Blockchain is fairly young and new technology, and it still needs lots of work to be done in order to make it production and enterprise ready. In the supply chain, maybe you don’t want your manufacturer to get all information about the product. Blockchain was designed for transparency, but in this case, blockchain needs to ensure that it can selectively grant access rights to information to particular parties. This is a very important part for blockchain to move into enterprise space. 

Challenge 6: Blockchain makes sense in a world we “might” move into, which takes time. 

We can learn from the Internet that adoption takes one generation. Blockchain is at the year of ten but for the first five years, people only viewed blockchain as Bitcoin instead of technology. In recent years, people realize that blockchain can be used for other fields and benefit for our life. 

***

Bio: Ricardo Garcia - Helping Developers Deploy Blockchain Proof-of-concepts, Platforms & Applications at BigchainDB