Blockchain Businesses and Users

The blockchain business space is convex. By convex I mean that the businesses developing in the space are either large organizations, or small startups. The space looks a little like the graph below.

This isn’t necessarily good or bad, it just is. On the right of the graph you have very large organizations, like Accenture, Microsoft, and IBM. On the left you have companies like Monax, Ripple, and Coinbase.

Given the relative newness of blockchain technology the distribution of companies into two peaks, one of small companies and one of large companies, makes sense. Large organizations have the resources to test out new ideas without too much disruption to their business. On the other side, small companies have the agility, and often exclusive competencies, to try and build businesses around new ideas.

On the flip-side, the blockchain user space looks similar to the blockchain business space. The early adopters are largely very small users (e.g. individual holders of bitcoin), and large enterprise institutions. The chart is effectively the same as that for the business space.

Until a “killer app” for blockchain is developed the chart above will not change, and widespread adoption will not exist. For widespread adoption to actually exist the blockchain user space will have to look something like the chart below.

When midsize and small organizations are using blockchain, say a trucking company in southern Illinois or a local grocer in Argentina, then blockchain can be considered to have made it, but that is a long way off.

Smart Contracts Patent Filings on the Rise

I previously wrote about smart contracts showing up in patent filings over at Medium. I wanted to do an update to that post to see how many more filings have shown up.

In the previous post on July 21, 2016, there were seven published patent applications that mention smart contracts. Rerunning the search on March 19, 2017, shows that there are now fifty-six published patent applications that mention smart contracts.  This growth in filings is consistent with the rise in the number of patent filings that mention bitcoin, blockchain, and distributed ledgers. Patent filings show maturity in a new technology space, an issue I’ve discussed before, and smart contracts are proving to be no different. The chart below shows the growth on the horizon.

The number of patent filings that mention smart contracts published in 2015 jumps dramatically in 2016. Considering that the Ethereum project went live in late 2015, it is not surprising that we don’t see many filings in 2015. Now that Ethereum has proved itself, and use cases for smart contracts are being tested, there will likely be many more filings that mention smart contracts. Three months in to 2017 we are on track to surpass 2016, and probably see around 80 patent filings that mention smart contracts.