Playing the field

We were interested to see what the most popular development platforms are for these unicorns. Ethereum is being used for developing blockchain applications by 22 companies on the Forbes 50. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as Ethereum was designed to accommodate decentralized applications and smart contracts. Following closely behind are the 21 companies building on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. The appeal of this system is that it is still open source, but is designed to be natively permissioned. Large corporations find the appeal of a permissioned blockchain like Hyperledger to be quite compelling, though Ethereum also supports similar configurations despite its more utopian origins.

Corda is the next most popular platform with 14 companies. Corda is enterprise distributed ledger technology (DLT) from the R3 consortium, which is made up of 200 of the world’s biggest banks and multinationals. JP Morgan’s Quorum, which powers its Interbank Information Network of 75 worldwide banking partners, is being actively developed on by 11 of the Forbes Blockchain 50. Like Ethereum, Hyperledger, and Corda, Quorum is open source and is being contributed to by developers all over the world. IBM, one of Hyperledger’s primary supporters, has five of the Forbes Blockchain 50 developing on its own platform.

The most interesting trend across these 50 companies is that nearly all of them are building on more than one blockchain platform. While these firms may end up committing to developing on a singular technology (such as Ant Financial or Oracle), it is clear that for now, they are hedging by working with multiple platforms. In the diagram below, you will see these company logos appear in multiple columns.