“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.” — Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1–2), William Shakespeare

There is a lot of hype surrounding Bitcoin and its underlying technology blockchain. Pause for a moment to spare a thought for the Long Island Tea Corp, a maker of soft drinks, which in December announced it would ‘leverage the benefits of blockchain technology’, changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp and seeing its share price soar by 500%. This scenario certainly reminds us of the dotcom boom, internet v1.0, when adding ‘on-line’, ‘e-’ or ‘internet’ to your company title or advertising strapline added unprecedented and largely undeserved value to companies.

If we look beyond the hype, the truth is that blockchain and its underlying distributed ledger technology, has significant merits, especially in verification and authentication to help facilitate faster and safer auditable transaction processing. Our advice to anyone thinking of investing is to look at the underlying business model before jumping on the blockchain bandwagon.

Here at aXpire, we have not included blockchain in the company title even though our underlying business is built on the technology. Technology is an enabler, but delivering business outcomes for our customers is what matters. We succeed as our clients succeed through the use of our end-to-end internal spend management software.

One day blockchain will become mainstream — we wonder if Long Blockchain Corp will change their name again when that happens?

Here’s to an exciting (and responsible) 2018 for cryptotechnology.

aXpire is a cloud-based and AI-enabled blockchain spend management company, find out more at aXpire.io. This article was written by Adrian Guttridge, an advisor to aXpire and an executive leader with over 30 years’ experience in IT and Operations.