Blockchain is not Crypto

Hundreds of companies received venture capital investments to take advantage of a brand new technology that promised a transformational change to the way we transact business, interact socially, and even conduct politics. The hype surrounding these enterprises grew at an exponential pace. Everyone who wasn’t an investor in one of these companies, wished they were.

And then the bubble burst. Companies burned through their venture capital investments without ever coming close to profitability. Skyrocketing values plummeted back to earth. Many companies failed, unable to find additional funding.

This could easily be the story we’re reading on the front page of any major news source today about the crypto crash. But it’s actually the story of the dot.com bubble and crash of the early 2000s. While history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.

Innovation and technological progress historically have never been linear, but rather come in fits and spurts. Gartner even has a name for it: the Hype cycle. Everyone gets excited and piles into a new technology too early, causing many premature ideas and ventures to fail. At the same time, though, and somewhat ironically, many of the best innovative companies and the lasting impact of their products are born in these crucibles of challenge.

If history is a guide, the same thing will happen in this technological cycle. Despite the current “crypto/NFT” meltdown, the underlying technology on which crypto projects are built, blockchain, will endure and thrive. To suggest blockchain is responsible for what is currently happening with crypto is like saying the World Wide Web is responsible for social media.

Blockchain, a specific distributed ledger technology (DLT), is a breakthrough innovation that will allow us to do things that have long been envisioned by those who were at the forefront of computer networking decades ago. It is the first technology that supports a decentralized point-to-point transition of any digital asset (token) from one entity (or state) to another without using a central coordinator. While cryptocurrency uses this to transfer monetary value, there are many other use cases where support for unhackable transitions of assets is game changing. Smart contracts and NFTs can be used to digitally track data assets (e.g. IP, legal documents, players in a game) or real world assets (e.g. supply chain, healthcare) to secure and/or optimize business processes. NFTs, for example, can provide digital proof of ownership for anything we own or interact with. Consequently, blockchain is suited where multi-step transactions need verification and traceability across, for example, untrusted entities such as suppliers, consortia or countries. It enables secure transactions, reduces compliance costs, and speeds up data transfer and processing. And since data on a blockchain is immutable, its state is permanent and therefore, the blockchain can provide a transparent, irrefutable single source of truth for these transactions, something a centralized database cannot do.

Taking the supply chain use-case as an example, such assets could include tracking parts from creation to installation to ensure their transition across the supply chain is fully traceable and verifiable, to make counterfeiting impossible and ownership, including the origins of those parts, fully transparent. NFTs can represent assemblies and can be linked through to subassembly NFTs to create a structured tracking mechanism for each step of production, and each supply chain tier. For data security, private blockchains can be contained completely within the organization’s environment and secured and since a blockchain is immutable, it makes it impossible for anyone, including adversaries or competitors, to tamper with the data.

Blockchain-backed apps are excellent for solving problems like:

SIMBA Chain makes building blockchain applications simple, fast, and inexpensive. SIMBA’s powerful combination of dynamic APIs, resilient availability, full chain freedom, structured data interface, and enterprise-grade security make it the best tool for enterprise development teams to bridge their web2 solutions with the benefits of web3.

There is no question that these blockchain solutions will take time to develop, perhaps, as Marc Andreesen suggests, decades. But however long it takes, the next revolution is coming, despite the fits and starts we see today. Contact us today to learn more about SIMBA Blocks.