The Real Business of Blockchain: How Leaders Can Create Value in a New Digital Age

Beyond operational improvements and increased efficiency, fully mature blockchain solutions will allow you to reengineer business relationships, monetize illiquid assets, and redistribute existing data and value flows in ways that could reinvent how your business engages in a digital world. That is the real business of blockchain.

The lack of tokens in blockchain-inspired solutions reinforces the centralization of power, since there is no mechanism to allow participants to control their information, provide consent, or trade it as an asset.

“We aren’t solving a trust problem. People do inherently trust the ASX to be the source of truth for the data that is in CHESS. We’re solving a data synchronicity problem.”

It means you can theoretically do business with an unknown partner located anywhere on the planet and trade any asset at any transaction size and not need a lawyer, a bank, an insurance company, or any other intermediary making sure both of you follow through on what you’ve promised to do.

Without tokenization and decentralized consensus, a blockchain-inspired solution cannot enable participants who do not know each other to exchange value without a third party validating the exchange.

Applied in the right context, blockchain-inspired solutions could, for example, improve efficiency; reduce back-office costs; speed up confirmation, settlement, and traceability; and improve data quality and management.

Enhanced blockchain will eventually allow microtransactions to take place between mutiple autonomous computerized objects without human intervention. From these capabilities, new markets will emerge to monetize previously unmonetizable or illiquid assets such as intellectual property (IP), data, physical objects, and other high-volume or high-value assets.

Blockchain can also redirect existing value flows. It does this by reducing control over four business currencies by central market powers—including large multinational corporations, digital platforms, and large intermediaries. The business currencies are: data, access, technology, and contracts.

As it pertains to blockchain technology, each of the underlying elements—distribution, encryption, immutability, tokenization, and decentralization—has a separate set of technologies associated with it, and each technology has its own maturity path.

Blockchain-inspired solutions use only three of the five elements—distribution, encryption, and immutability.