According to recent Bank of America (BoA) estimates, blockchain tech adoption will be a huge opportunity for tech giants like Amazon or Microsoft to increase their revenues by billions. The analysts at BoA worked under the assumption that two percent of corporate servers will eventually be used to run blockchain technology, at a cost of $5500 per year. If that were the case, blockchain could be a $7 billion opportunity for tech companies, although analysts did not estimate when that could happen, as the industry remains in the early phase of development.

Speaking to CNBC, BoA analyst Kash Rangan claimed that, “Amazon will benefit from incremental cloud services demand from Blockchain implementation, while improved supply chain tracking should make Amazon’s retail operations more efficient.“

Rangan also mentioned yet another potential use case for distributed ledger tech. Blockchain could improve “software as a service” (SaaS) models, such as Dropbox by integrating “blockchain as a service” (BaaS). He chose Microsoft’s blockchain-based Azure platform, explaining that, “BaaS on Azure offers services such as smart contracts and other third party apps, and should benefit as use of blockchain on Azure increases.“

BoA also mentioned other enterprises that would benefit from widespread blockchain adoption and they include tech companies Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, VMware, alongside real estate and mortgage industry leaders Redfin, Zillow and LendingTree.

However, BoA conceded that the money-making ability of blockchain is still unproven. According to Rangan, “Many blockchain use cases have been identified, but full products/services have not yet been built out and are not used in production.“

IBM has been probably the most active major company in the blockchain space. According to a research published last month, IBM is challenging Alibaba for the most blockchain-related patent applications, submitting 89 of them to the Chinese retail giant‘s 90. Interestingly, BoA is fourth on the list with 53 such applications.

IBM has also partnered the Columbia University to launch a blockchain research centre and signed a five year $740 million deal with the Australian government to implement blockchain across federal databases to improve data security and automation.

Last week, Walmart, Amazon‘s biggest competitor in the online retail industry, announced its leafy green suppliers have a year to start using a blockchain-based system that was developed in tandem with IBM. The new platform will speed up identifying, researching and reacting to food safety situations. According to the press release, “it is the first step of bringing the benefits of open and transparent information to the food industry.“

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