What Are Enterprises Doing With Blockchain?
Crypto Basics

What Are Enterprises Doing With Blockchain?

It’s just not crypto startups building on blockchains — enterprises are also getting involved. Blockdata dives into some of the top enterprises that are experimenting with the tech.

What Are Enterprises Doing With Blockchain?

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Many of the top companies in the world are experimenting and working with blockchain technologies. We see many news reports on completing successful blockchain pilots, hiring large-scale research teams and heavily investing into blockchain funding rounds. 

But which of these big corporations are actually building blockchain solutions themselves?

We at Blockdata recently published a report analyzing the top 100 companies based on market cap. The research found that 81% of them are currently using blockchain to some degree and have started exploring the technology as early as 2014.

 Some other key statistics include:

  • 27% of them have a fully live blockchain-based service.

  • 38% of them have invested in a combined 113 blockchain companies in funding rounds that total $3.5 billion.  
  • The most popular technologies used are Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, Quorum  and Corda (across 30 unique technologies).

For this article, we took a quick dive into some of these corporations and selected those who have live blockchain solutions, and/or are close to launching a production-ready service. 

These solutions are not only concentrated in one particular industry, but across a wide variety of them. The most popular industries are DLT (infrastructure & blockchain services) payments, security, energy, pharma, banking and supply chain.

Additionally, when examining the type of blockchain companies these big institutions invested in, we found a total of 83 different use cases. The most common ones were focused on integrating their own blockchain services (infrastructure & protocols), payment solutions, trading & exchanges, post-trade and custody solutions.

Below is a list of some of these top institutions who have shown recent activity in blockchain. 

Microsoft Corporation 

Microsoft has been involved in blockchain since 2017 and is known for their Azure Blockchain Service. The company has also been busy with a couple of new initiatives. In March 2021, Microsoft announced the launch of their ION Digital ID Network on the Bitcoin network. 

This network is a layer 2 technology that focuses on using Bitcoin’s blockchain to create digital IDs for identity authentication. 

To date, Microsoft is currently working with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Quorum technologies.

Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google Cloud, has been involved in blockchain since 2016. They are known for their blockchain services with the Google Cloud Platform, where you can currently deploy Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum networks and applications.

They are also the part of the governing council for Hedera Hashgraph, and became a cloud partner for the Theta Network. More recently, in August 2021, Google Cloud began providing blockchain insights for the Polygon network (a scaling solution for Ethereum).

Integrating the network with Google’s BigQuery (a powerful indexer) enables developers to conduct more simple on-chain analytics, and compare between multiple blockchain networks.

To date, they are currently working with Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and Theta Blockchain, and a variety of other layer-2 and application layer solutions.

Other companies working in blockchain include:

Saudi Aramco: 

  • Launched a successful pilot last year for background checks and credentials.

  • After the pilot’s success, their investment arm Wa’ed invested into one of Saudi Arabia’s first blockchain technology start-ups IR4LAB for the detection of fraudulent certifications. 
  • Technologies used: Hyperledger Fabric, GumboNet.

Amazon

  • Involved in blockchain since 2018, Amazon is known for their Amazon Managed Blockchain services. AMB allows you to join public networks or set up managed scalable private networks (such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric).
  • Major use cases for this blockchain service include retail (customer loyalty, rewards), supply chain and trading/asset transfer. 

  • Technologies used: Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum

Facebook

  • Involved in blockchain since 2017, Facebook’s Diem project (formally known as Libra) is currently still in development after a number of regulatory implications. 

  • Diem is a permissioned blockchain-based payment system with its own blockchain and private stablecoin currency. 

  • Facebook has continued to develop other solutions such as the Novi wallet (formally Calibra) for micro transfers and general payments.  
  • Technologies used: Diem.

Tencent Holdings

  • Engaged in blockchain since 2017, the Chinese tech conglomerate has already launched its Tencent Cloud Blockchain-as-a-Service (TBaaS).
  • The service allows you to build your own infrastructure and blockchain services on their open cloud platform. Customers can either purchase a BaaS system on the public cloud, or build privately. 

  • Technologies used: FISCO BCOS, Changan Chain, Hyperledger Fabric.

NVIDIA Corp

  • Tech giant and investor of the GPU, NVIDIA has been involved in blockchain since 2019. It is slightly different to other service providers in the sense that it provides physical hardware miners. Their product, NVIDIA CMP HX, is a dedicated GPU for professional mining.
  • This also helps the rising demand from customers, who can now access these chips rather than buying the latest graphics card chips originally intended for video gaming.  

  • Technologies used: Ethereum.

With revenue streams in the billions, and with a number of these solutions already live and running on blockchain technology, it is only a matter of time until other companies follow suit. Already 46% of the top 100 companies have a dedicated blockchain team (this is excluding others who use third party services), and we expect this number to rise.  

We recognize that many large corporations are still in their pilot phases, but it is important to look at those who’s blockchain solutions are currently in development. With professional teams and strong financing at their disposal, Blockdata is expecting a lot of new developments to transition into full production services over the course of this year and next. 

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