Blockchain Will Have a Transformational Impact in 5 to 10 Years

The 2019 Gartner Hype Cycle for Blockchain Business shows that the business impact of blockchain will be transformational across most industries within 5 to 10 years. The Hype Cycle provides an overview of how blockchain capabilities are evolving from a business perspective and maturity across different industries.

“Even though they are still uncertain of the impact blockchain will have on their businesses, 60% of CIOs in the Gartner 2019 CIO Agenda Survey said that they expected some level of adoption of blockchain technologies in the next three years“ said David Furlonger, distinguished research vice-president at Gartner. “However, the existing digital infrastructure of organizations and the lack of clear blockchain governance are limiting CIOs from getting full value with blockchain.“

Banking and investment services industries continue to experience significant levels of interest from innovators seeking to improve decades old operations and processes. However, only 7.6% of respondents to the CIO Survey suggested that blockchain is a game-changing technology. That said, nearly 18% of banking and investment services CIOs said they have adopted or will adopt some form of blockchain technology within the next 12 months and nearly another 15% within two years.

In the fast-growing esport industry, blockchain natives are launching solutions that allow users to create their own tokens to support the design of competition as well as to enable trading of virtual goods. The tokens provide gamers with more control over their in-game items making them more portable across gaming platforms.

In retail, Blockchain is being considered for “track and trace“ services, counterfeit prevention, inventory management and auditing, any of which could be used to improve product quality or food safety, for example. Whilst these examples have value, the real impact of blockchain for retail industry will depend on supporting new ideas, such as using blockchain to transform or augment loyalty programs.

Once it has been combined with the IoT and AI, blockchain has the potential to change retail business models forever, impacting both data and monetary flows and avoiding centralization of market power. As a result, Gartner believes that blockchain has the potential to transform business models across all industries, but these opportunities demand that enterprises adopt complete blockchain ecosystems. Without tokenization and decentralization, most industries will not see real business value.