"There is a huge need and a huge opportunity for everyone to enter a connected world, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that needs to be built is unprecedented, and we think that's the most important problem we can focus on now."
Angel or demon? Agent of change or grand conspirator? Transforming the world or dominating the world? If we intend to judge Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by his moral characteristics, we will probably be wrong because we will be carried away by our prejudices or our enthusiasms. But if we are to judge his business vision, there is no doubt about the scope of his bets: he said Facebook, and it is the social network par excellence; he said WhatsApp and in the part of the world where it is used it seems to have no rival; he said Instagram and it is still the leader in photography and ephemeral content. Now it has been saying blockchain for some time, specifically Libra, which is what it is expected to call the cryptocurrency it will launch in 2020. Will Libra dominate the cryptocurrency market?
In view of the impact on business of the Digital Transformation of society, no one today doubts the value of companies and their managers having not only a presence on social networks, but also a more or less in-depth knowledge of their characteristics, uses and functionalities. "If you're not there, you don't exist", hundreds of thousands of consumers or potential customers of increasingly wide and diverse age ranges, belonging to more and more market segments, remind you every day.
Following the same rule of three, if you are not prepared to move in the cryptocurrency environment, you are beginning to cease to exist for thousands of consumers who are now at the forefront of this phenomenon. And the warning is not trivial: the acceptance of the phenomenon by many companies is still light years away from what we should consider "normal" in something that has all the traces of being a "hard and fast" reality tomorrow.
Let's take a strategic sector: healthcare. Let's take a market: Europe. Well, almost half (44%) of European companies linked to the healthcare sector have not heard, literally have not heard, anything about Blockchain, the protocol or technology on which the most popular of cryptocurrencies is based: bitcoin. This is one of the most striking conclusions of a recent study by the U.S. market research firm International Data Corporation, better known by its acronym IDC. Published on June 6 following surveys of 290 organizations in the sector, the report questions the reality of blockchain's incorporation into major industries.
We should not think that among the remaining 56% the blockchain is a perfectly implemented technology, since of this group of companies only 1 in 8 (12%) has some kind of relationship with the technology. This percentage is reduced to a meager 2%, that is, practically testimonial, if we talk about companies that have some kind of initiatives in blockchain, or in DLT projects ("distributed ledger", for its acronym in English: the type of technology that serves as an umbrella for blockchain).
According to the research, there are three main use cases for blockchain technology in the European healthcare industry: transaction agreements; identity management; and shared records management. Of the three, it is the identity use case that appears to be the most successful, with a three-fold increase over current rates of planned technology adoption over the next 12 months.
If this fact may seem worrying, we must add to it a question that is as necessary as it is pertinent: is there an excess of "hype" (expectations) behind blockchain? To put it in less technical terms: is there a big ball being manufactured behind which there is hardly anything to support it? This is not politically correct, but another recent study published by Anchain.ai on the social network Medium gives a good slap on the wrist to the excessive and excessive fascination with this phenomenon.
According to its research, the equivalent of about $6 million in transaction volume on blockchain developments was driven solely by "rampant and malicious" activity by bots (non-human mechanisms) specializing in Dapss (decentralized applications), dolo during the first quarter of 2019. Described as "the largest scale study of malicious bots in the EOS ecosystem" (a blockchain variant with its own cryptocurrency), the research determines that more than half (51%) of unique accounts, and three-quarters (75%) of total transactions were driven by non-human accounts.
Data that calls into question "the integrity of the blockchain industry", since user activity is one of the most requested metrics to determine the technological validity of blockchain-type solutions.
The research was aimed at scrutinizing millions of transactions from the top 10 decentralized financial "gaming" platforms, such as gambling and investment platforms. These 10 platforms account for 13 out of 20 (65%) EOS transactions, and the aim was to monitor performance and detect suspicious activity. Using AnChain's core Artificial Intelligence, "repetitive or hyperactive" accounts were detected and eliminated, as they are merely malicious bots.
So malicious that their aims include objectives such as obtaining illegitimate profits in dividends, sabotaging competitors or even launching attacks on vulnerable points of the chain. For example, five Ethereum addresses were responsible for an attack that used 50,000 bots to steal $4 million over two weeks. In particular, during the study, AnChain identified five Ethereum addresses behind an extremely sophisticated attack that employed 50,000 malicious self-destructing bots to steal $4 million over two weeks by exploiting a contract flaw in a popular gambling game.
In any case, the time to be a leader in a market that doesn't look like it's going to stop is now, when there are most likely multiple opportunities in your industry to take sides. Whether or not it's more than hype, if Mr. Zuck is going to enter the market, it might be worth taking a look before dismissing him with the familiar "this is going nowhere", which so often leaves those who utter it out of the loop.
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash
