PwC today released a new research report looking into blockchain technology adoption. The study surveyed over 600 executives across the globe to understand their views on blockchain and its potential.

The results are clear – the majority see the relevance with 84% of leaders stating that they already having blockchain initiatives underway if not already live.

To summarise the general consensus is one of FOMO (fear of missing out) with many businesses telling PwC

“that they don’t want to be left behind by blockchain”

However, there still remains some major hesitations and rightfully so stating that:

“Even if at this early stage of its development, concerns on trust and regulation remain. Blockchain by its very definition should engender trust. But in reality, companies confront trust issues at nearly every turn”

At Quant Network, our team have walked in the shoes of these leaders in our previous CIO/CTO/CISO roles in government and enterprise, we have felt the exact hesitations and concerns. In fact its these are exact barriers that we have addressed in the design of Overledger.

First, regulatory uncertainty

This was the exact vision and purpose for why I founded the ISO standard TC307 for Blockchain Technology in 2015. The ISO group now brings 47 countries together to work on developing standards across the board. The group is made up of leaders across enterprise and government who have come together to work on a common set of rules to standardise and govern blockchain technologies. We expect the standards to be finalised by 2021. If you’d like to be involved be sure to reach out to your country’s standards body to join the mirror committee. In the UK it’s the BSI and the mirror committee is DLT/1, which I chair.

Blockchains not working together

Blockchains not working together makes zero sense to us. Why can’t a transaction on Ethereum be recognized on Hyperledger or Ripple? Today, with Blockchains, we are currently operating in such a way if your mobile phone is with a particular carrier, you can only call and text people within the same carrier. You have no way of contacting someone else who is using a different carrier. Furthermore, you can not take your mobile phone to another country, it just won’t work. There’s no way of having mobile roaming.

Interoperability in blockchain is so pertinent. Without it we won’t be able to fully realize the potential of this technology but only if it’s done effectively with the end customer and clients’ needs thought about. Interoperability via another blockchain or adding a consensus, duplication or complexity does very little to ease the minds of enterprise leads who want to adopt this technology.

Ability to bring networks together

The fundamental difference between Overledger and any other interoperability project is the fact that not only do we allow blockchains to connect to one another we also connect the world’s networks to blockchain. What we mean by this is the fact that all other blockchain projects require a total upheaval of the enterprise’s existing ‘legacy’ system – this is simply not feasible for many sectors and when you are consider networks in the Financial Services and Healthcare space – it’s not entirely possibly without a huge impact to service.

With Overledger you can connect into blockchain by essentially integrating your existing infrastructure instead of having to change everything underneath.

Inability to scale

The ability to maintain legacy systems and ensure interoperability also means that business can scale up or down at any time. It also means they can spread their risk across multiple blockchains by having more choice and better resillience. It’s the same approach to business continuity and disaster recovery to have multiple sites for their data and Datacenters to minimise risk in the event of an outage. Many enterprise leaders have also said they don’t know where to begin because of the proprietary vendor and technology “locked in” of blockchain. They feel they are being forced to put all their eggs in the one basket – so to speak.

Enterprises chose interoperable and compatible systems in IT, they want to be able to update, migrate and change vendors and providers easily when needed. that’s why have standards in technology. Enterprises don’t favour proprietary technology where you can’t easily migrate or change the technology once it’s implemented. It can be done but it will require a complete re-architecture and a new implementation from scratch.

Currently with blockchain technology, enterprises can’t test or trial various blockchains easily and have inter-connectively. Today it’s quite binary, it’s one or the other. This means currently enterprises are completely incapable of adjusting and scaling.

Imagine you’re an insurance company and you’ve implemented new products on a particular blockchain, invested millions to launch it. This new blockchain-based product will generate new revenues for your company and bring in new customers. Everything has tested ok internally. Everyone is excited. You launch and soon realise when you went live with lots of usage and load the whole solution grinds to a halt, is unable to cope and you start hearing complainants. You need to move to another blockchain but you can’t.

You have stop and start over with another blockchain. Although a theoretical scenario, this is not a good position to be in to explain what went wrong to your CEO or Board. What if your product could operate on multiple Blockchains at the same time, giving you resilience, allowing you to scale out to any blockchain as needed and leveraging the different features from the different blockchain technologies?

This is another benefit of Overledger. You’re never locked it and it also helps your bottom-line by being able to manage various ledger fees.