By Simon Harman

The blockchain industry was on everyone’s radar in 2017 and 2018, as the technology garnered public attention and cryptocurrencies experienced another explosion in retail investment. At the same time, the industry gained as many critics as it had advocates – with opposing claims that blockchain technology was either little more than digital snake oil or a silver bullet for the world’s problems.

While critics may have good reason to believe that blockchain technology is all hype and no substance, as industries mature, projects start to deliver substantive solutions and real-world applications become clearer. All that is needed is time and patience.



From outside of the blockchain sector, it is clear why critics have labelled the technology 21st century snake oil. Similar to the dot-com bubble, the explosive growth of the blockchain sector in the past few years has seen numerous projects raise huge amounts of capital only to flounder in the early stages of development.

Distrust of the sector has hardly been helped by dishonest actors cashing in on public appetite, with projects such as OneCoin or Bitconnect raising hundreds of millions of dollars only to be unveiled as Ponzi schemes and shut down by authorities. Worse still are the hundreds of more convincing companies promising revolutionary and ambitious products, only to squander the funds raised and fail to deliver any product whatsoever. It is easy to see, in this context, why members of the public may have become disillusioned with blockchain technology as a whole.



However, despite the many headlines highlighting the growing pains of the blockchain sector, progress is always being made. The actual usage of blockchain technologies is steadily increasing, and research into privacy, novel cryptography techniques and ancillary technologies such homomorphic encryption, which could all have a huge impact on cybersecurity, have all been rapidly accelerated thanks to the rise of blockchain technology.