"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 believe that is the most important problem we can focus on right now."
Angel or demon? Agent of change or grand conspirator? Transform the world or dominate the world? If we try to judge Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by his moral characteristics, we will probably be wrong because we will be swayed by our prejudices or our enthusiasm. But if we have to judge his business vision, there is no doubt about the scope of his ventures: 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 continues to be the leader in photography and ephemeral content. Now he has been talking about blockchain for some time, specifically Libra, which is what he plans to call the cryptocurrency he will launch in 2020. Will Libra dominate the cryptocurrency market?
Given the impact of society's digital transformation on business, no one today doubts the value of companies and their executives not only having a presence on social media, but also having a more or less in-depth knowledge of its characteristics, uses, and functionalities. "If you're not there, you don't exist," hundreds of thousands of consumers or potential customers of increasingly broad and diverse age ranges, belonging to more and more market segments, remind them every day.
Following the same rule of three, if you are not prepared to move into the cryptocurrency environment, you are beginning to cease to exist for thousands of consumers who are currently 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 makings of being a "hard cash" 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 not heard, anything about Blockchain, the protocol or technology on which the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is based. This is one of the most striking conclusions of a recent study by the US market research firm International Data Corporation, better known by its acronym IDC. Published on June 6 after surveying 290 organizations in the sector, the report calls into question the reality of blockchain's incorporation into major industries.
We should not assume that blockchain is a perfectly implemented technology among the remaining 56%, as only 1 in 8 (12%) of this group of companies has any kind of relationship with the technology. This percentage drops to a meager 2%, which is practically negligible, if we are talking about companies that have some kind of blockchain initiatives or DLT (distributed ledger technology, the type of technology that serves as an umbrella for blockchain) projects.
According to the research, there are three main use cases for blockchain technology in the European healthcare industry: transaction agreements; identity management; and shared record management. Of the three, identity management appears to be the most successful, with an increase that triples current rates in terms of technology adoption planning for the next 12 months.
While this data may seem worrying, we must add a question that is as necessary as it is pertinent: is there too much hype (expectations) behind blockchain? In less technical terms: is a big fuss being made about something that has little substance behind it? It is not politically correct to say so, but another recent study published by Anchain.ai on the social network Medium gives a good slap on the wrist to the excessive and unbridled fascination with this phenomenon.
According to their research, the equivalent of approximately $6 million in transaction volume on blockchain developments was driven solely by "rampant and malicious" activity from bots (non-human mechanisms) specializing in DAPPs (decentralized applications) during the first quarter of 2019. Described as "the largest study of malicious bots in the EOS ecosystem" (a variant of blockchain 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.
This data calls into question "the integrity of the blockchain industry," as user activity is one of the most sought-after metrics for determining the technological validity of blockchain-type solutions.
The investigation focused on 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 every 20 (65%) EOS transactions, and the aim was to monitor performance and detect suspicious activity. Using AnChain'score Artificial Intelligence, "repetitive or hyperactive" accounts were detected and eliminated, as they were merely malicious bots.
So malicious that their goals include objectives such as obtaining illegitimate profits in dividends, sabotaging competitors, or even launching attacks on vulnerable points in 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 self-destructing malicious bots to steal $4 million over two weeks by exploiting a contract flaw in a popular gaming game.
In any case, now is the time to be a leader in a market that shows no signs of slowing down, when there are likely to be multiple opportunities to take advantage of in your sector. Whether or not it is anything more than hype, if Mr. Zuck is going to enter the market, it may be worth taking a look before dismissing it with the usual "this is going nowhere," which so often leaves those who say it out of the game.
Photo byHitesh ChoudharyonUnsplash
