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Blockchain market for businesses will grow to $20B in 10 years, report says

The report examines 29 different "use cases" where blockchain-based product lines are emerging across 19 different business sectors — well beyond bitcoin.
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Businesses across the globe spent $2.5 billion this year on blockchain, the cryptographic technology that makes digital currencies like bitcoin possible — and by 2025 that will rise to $19.9 billion, predicts a new report.

The report, Blockchain for Enterprise Applications, from market research outfit Tractica, examines market trends, technology developments and industry players in the rapidly evolving sector.

The report examines 29 different “use cases” where blockchain-based product lines are emerging across 19 different business sectors. “Many of [these] offer significant advantages in terms of cost savings, efficiency, security, and compliance compared to traditional systems and business processes,” said principal analyst Jessica Groopman in a statement.

Blockchain is also known as distributed ledger technology because it uses encryption and distributed computing power to create a constantly updated and cryptographically secure record of transactions that’s distributed among all its participants.

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Because it generates a trustworthy record of a transaction held by all parties to it, many people see blockchain as the key to moving, tracking and storing all kinds of value and valuable information online — well beyond digital currency.

Blockchain “is enjoying a blossoming beyond cryptocurrency and the transfer of money, to an architecture able to support many types of transactions, from logging an event, to signing a document, to voting, to allocating energy between parties, and far beyond,” said Groopman.

“In the last year alone, over a hundred financial institutions, more than two dozen governments, and countless corporations and venture capitalists have invested more than $1 billion into blockchain startups,” she added.

Groopman concluded by asking readers to see “through the fog of hype” to “the sobering reality that this is a market of extreme nascence and fragmentation; a notable void of in-production or at-scale implementations; and a lack of regulatory, legal, governance, collaborative, economic, digital, and even cultural precedent.”

Despite the hurdles, however, she said that blockchain has the potential to impact a wide variety of industries.

Shaun Waterman

Written by Shaun Waterman

Contact the reporter on this story via email Shaun.Waterman@FedScoop.com, or follow him on Twitter @WatermanReports. Subscribe to CyberScoop to get all the cybersecurity news you need in your inbox every day at CyberScoop.com.

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