Josh Nussbaum from Compound wrote an excellent post about the blockchain project ecosystem. It is clear that the current gamut of ICO funded projects is heavily skewed towards projects related to i) crypto economy infrastructure, ii) bringing real world financial concepts to crypto currencies, or iii) adding blockchain technology benefits to already established online sectors, such as social networking, content creation, internet browsing, data storage, gaming and a few others.

A significant minority of projects lies in the sectors that cross over into the real economy and address real world interactions between various market constituents. For example, this faction of ICO pioneers includes developments in insurance, legal, marketplace, supply chain, logistics, real asset and security investment and ticketing sectors.

Such skewness of distribution of projects along the crypto-real world continuum may be due to a number of factors, most pertinent of which are i) regulation uncertainty, ii) legal enforceability of smart contract obligations in real world, and iii) to a very significant degree, usage propagation amongst consumers and businesses.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos very insightfully described blockchain as a “dumb network” that underpins a new wave of “smart applications”. Projects that are geared towards developing blockchains for real world purposes face uphill battles in either building the consumer or enterprise level applications for the blockchain themselves or incentivizing the developer community to do the same.

Even a greater rarity are projects that seek to build blockchains to empower their already functioning business ecosystems where players already use software applications to execute transactions and/or manage certain aspects of their operations. Such existing businesses overwhelmingly create private blockchains.

A few examples include: a ticket trading blockchain created by Alfa Bank and S7 Airlines; a blockchain due to be launched in 2018 by a consortium of major banks to facilitate settlements (UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, CIBS, HSBC, MUFG, State Street, Deutsche Bank, Banco Santander, Bank of New York Mellon and NEX); or Mastercard Blockchain API to enable B2B payments. These and others are admirable corporate endeavors, but they are devoid of blockchain’s true potential. They lack decentralization, require trust in institutions and ultimately represent just a newer generation of enterprise IT solutions.

CarFix, whith over Eur 5 million of equity funding from marquee investors, over the last 18 months, created an extensive auto servicing and broader vehicle lifecycle ecosystem. This ecosystem is conducive to a fully decentralized, utility token powered blockchain that streamlines the $1.8 trillion vehicle lifecycle industry — one of the largest in the world in terms of sheer size and scope.

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