Blockchain Trip Report
Leonovus attended Blockchain Expo North America last week in Santa Clara.
BLOCKCHAIN EVENT KEY TAKEAWAYS
We were pleased to see that several of our key views resonate with the blockchain community.
HYPERLEDGER FABRIC
Leonovus’ Vault product connects with our Evidence Locker product for storing event logs in a secure, immutable way using a blockchain. We use Hyperledger Fabric as the technology for our Evidence Locker product. From the amount of attention Fabric is getting from the industry, particularly for enterprise applications, this validates our direction so far. Fabric is the most complete blockchain platform that supports enterprise features like permissioning, scalability, channels, and advanced smart contracts. For Galaxa, our vision of a global marketplace for cloud services, we haven’t yet chosen the final blockchain platform. There remain plenty of interesting alternatives; it’s great to see so much effort towards enterprise-grade solutions. We’ve moved way beyond cryptocurrencies.
SECURITY TOKEN OFFERINGS (STOS) – GALAXA
For Galaxa, we intend to raise investments through an STO (Security Token Offering), which is very different from an ICO. The general sentiment at the conference was strongly anti-ICO, because of all the scams or pipe dreams that simply haven’t materialized into legitimate projects. One speaker touted 86% as the number of ICO projects that turned out to be scams. Even huge projects like Telegram, which raised billions based on airy promises, turned out to lack substance. There is a strong movement towards regulated Security Tokens, and Leonovus is leading the way with our efforts to sell tokens and SAFTs on regulated exchanges. It’s critical that projects put in place governance and accountability for how they intend to spend the investments and play by the rules for know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering. In the future, I expect we will see many legitimate businesses using blockchain-based tokens for investment into real, tangible projects.
BLOCKCHAIN ‘THE ENABLER’
From what I’ve seen in the industry, a lot of companies continue to bill themselves as “blockchain companies”, as though a blockchain is their product. While that may be true for a few technology platform projects like Hyperledger, most companies are using blockchain merely as a technical building block, like a database. I’m encouraged to see somewhat of a shift in the way companies talk about blockchain as just one technology of many that they use to build a product. It’s a slow shift, but hopefully we’ll get to a point where companies don’t even talk about blockchain, but just about the customer solutions that blockchain enables.
We’ve passed a threshold; blockchain is no longer equated with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, at least not among the tech community. Projects in supply chain management and financial transactions are legitimizing this technology for mainstream enterprise use.
