Addressing Key Challenges to Making Enterprise Blockchain Applications a Reality

A blockchain application is a peer-to-peer system for validating, time-stamping and permanently storing transactions and agreements on a shared ledger that is distributed to all participating nodes.3 Bitcoin was the original blockchain, described by Satoshi Nakamoto in a 2008 white paper.4 The Bitcoin application was coded—presumably by Nakamoto—and went live in January 2009. Since then, many traditional enterprises as well as startups have been exploring the possibility of adapting Bitcoin’s blockchain technology for business applications. Blockchain applications potentially offer several advantages compared to centrally controlled applications. Specifically, blockchain applications promise a significant amount of business value, including transacting directly with trading partners, eliminating the need for reconciliations, instantly tracking and tracing assets, providing data provenance, settling transactions quickly and cheaply, and enabling a security model that is fault tolerant, resilient and available. (Appendix A describes the advantages of blockchain applications.) In the words of Antony Lewis, founder of Bits on Blockchain, in essence, “distributed ledgers ‘confirm as you go’ rather than ‘confirm after the fact’.”5