Blockchain is starting to show the true promise in the middle of the advertising campaign

The blockchain revolution is also very, very down the road. If it ever will come.

Partnerships and initiatives with blockchain seem to be flaunted every day. Projects that actually solve real-world problems are much rarer. The research firm Gartner interviewed 3,160 principal information managers this year and found that only 1% had put the blockchain into operation.

Take the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton (ticker: BHP), which announced in 2016 that it would use blockchain to track the supply chain, including the movement of rock and fluid samples. But after the company tested it in a pilot project, a BHP executive said this month that the technology "has not reached the point of maturity in which we think it applies to us."

As technology achieves what Gartner calls "peak inflated expectations," executives and investors must learn to evaluate the exaggeration of real potential.

Companies that are not yet considering how to use the blockchain to restructure their operations, particularly in finance and logistics, risk making their software obsolete, and even their business models.

"We see it as a transformation in the same way that the Internet has changed communication," says Marie Wieck, general manager for blockchain of IBM (IBM), which has more than 1,500 staff members who work on technology.

Still, it's a bit like trying to catch the future winners and losers of the Internet in the early 90s. Tomorrow & # 39; s Facebook and its Pets.com are not yet visible to the horizon.

What is this technology that has such enthusiastic supporters? A blockchain is a database managed by software that collects information, protects it by encryption and stores it on participants' computers. Similar to a ledger, it allows its participants to interact with each other without the use of a central intermediary. As a result, transactions can be executed faster and cheaper.

The absence of an intermediary is key to the potential of the blockchain, says Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, a branch of the non-profit Linux Foundation that has become a central player in the development of blockchain.

"Blockchain is not a technological solution to a technological problem," he says. "It's a technological solution to a political problem, a political problem in the business world, you do not want a PayPal or an eBay or Uber or a Facebook at the center of many markets, because it gives enormous power to those entities, greater than one might think AT & T had when it was at the center of the telephone market. "

The lack of central authority can also be an obstacle, however. Blockchains used by companies tend to be authorized: participants must demonstrate who they are and their access to information is limited according to their specific needs. Making competitors agree on terms can be difficult.

Today, technology is growing largely through consortia that allow companies to share the cost of software development and ensure that they are building systems that will be compatible with each other. These efforts have shown how the blockchain can standardize business processes that are still largely paper-based or using obsolete technologies and how it can fill gaps in industries where trust is a problem.

Blythe Masters, a former JPMorgan Chase executive who is now CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, sees inefficiencies in transactions and record keeping as a rich opportunity for blockchain.

"Fifteen years ago, if someone had said we will see the advent of self-driving on the streets before seeing the T + 2 settlements [trades getting settled two days after they take place] and before you can walk from a doctor's office to the And get you out of your health care record, you'd be declared crazy, right? "Says Masters.

"These are the extraordinary delays and inefficiencies that have plagued financial services and big businesses in other sectors like health care." You've seen tremendous speed of revolution in the Big Tech industry and not Have you ever seen anywhere else in the company? Here's where this is going, and so what fascinates about this is the breadth of potential for applications. "

Blockchain will generate $ 5 billion worth of commercial value in 2018, Gartner estimates. The value will grow, but it is likely to remain modest for years, before rising more impressive from a decade to now, surpassing $ 3.1 trillion dollars in 2030, says the company. This is more than Britain's entire annual economic output today.

Some blockchain executives giggle nervously when presented with that number. One fell silent, then joked that he would put him in his deck of investors.

Others are more willing to embrace the number.

The $ 3 trillion figure "does not seem crazy to me," says Masters. His company has won a contract to redesign the clearing and settlement process at the Australian Securities Exchange using blockchain. "When you think about the potential addressable market here, it does not look crazy at all."

For investors, there are a few ways to invest directly in blockchain. Some publicly traded funds have been introduced, including Amplify Transformational Data Sharing (BLOK), Reality Shares Nasdaq NexGen Economy (BLCN) and Innovation Shares NextGen Protocol (KOIN), but offer a minimum real income exposure to technology, which is currently generating little revenue.

Large companies, particularly IBM and Microsoft (MSFT), have invested heavily in the development of blockchains. Neither company outbreaks its blockchain-based revenue into public financial documents, and does not share data with those of [Barry] . WinterGreen Research, a Massachusetts-based technology company, estimates that IBM and Microsoft together control 51% of the blockchain market, which together generated revenue of $ 706 million last year.

"I believe we are more distant," says IBM Wieck, who has worked with more than 500 clients.

Some early blockchain success stories were not created by technology giants, however.

AXA (CS.France), the French insurance company, uses blockchain technology to transform the insurance sector of flight. His product, called Fizzy, allows flyers to buy an insurance that pays immediately if their flight is delayed by more than two hours, for whatever reason.

"Blockchain is useful because it allows me to tell the customer that you do not" I have to trust the insurer on the data we are using ", Laurent Benichou, founder of Fizzy, tells Barron & # 39; s. "Your politics is on the blockchain. AXA publicly undertakes to compensate you if you are eligible. Because an intelligent contract is causing compensation, the client can know that we are honest with the data we use. Potentially, for a paranoid customer who assumes to cheat, we say that it is no longer AXA which is a part of the transaction that will decide if you will be compensated. "

The project, which registered about 11,000 transactions so far, did not do much to change the short-term financial perspectives for AXA, which recorded € 98.6 billion ($ 112.5 billion) of revenue from the company. Last year, but Benichou expects airlines to offer this kind of service more extensively to customers in the years to come, and "when they do it will be a huge market".

Also, he thinks it can be used in broader way to ensure against different types of events.

"We could do a Fizzy for weather forecasting; we could do a Fizzy for pollution. Whenever we have an open data set, we are able to make a variation of Fizzy. "

Blockchain technology also proved useful in other transactions where trust issues previously hindered the market.

In India, small businesses were looking for a way to get pending bills from other paid companies The lenders had previously been cautious in financing these transactions, partly because of the risk of double billing, that companies would receive funding from multiple banks for the same transaction.

But a New York company, MonetaGo, has designed blockchain software that records invoices and tracks transactions that have already been financed The blockchain records transactions without disclosing details about them that could erode the competitive positioning of the companies involved.The project has been operational since March and the business has grown steadily, says Jesse Chenard, CEO of MonetaGo. taGo can earn around $ 20 million a year on service in India.

The system was adopted by major industry players in India.

"We have introduced a possibility for financiers to securely share data they would never have shared before," says Chenard. "To share them first, they would have to share the details of those invoices, and no one would ever trust the other to not look at the competitor's information." Taking on a third party to oversee the invoices for all the financiers would have been "cost-prohibitive", he adds.

"When we started in India, we said," We are a blockchain company, we can do anything with blockchain, "he says." The worst part to enter and say: "Hey, I'm a blockchain company" # 39; is that they send you to the innovation team. And as far as people like IT are concerned, it's a cost center. "

Now" our pace is completely different. We ask to speak with the person responsible for the finance of the trade and to say: "Would you like to reduce fraud on credit financing?" The answer is almost always yes. "

The cost has blocked the adoption of the blockchain Some of the existing players in the industries may have to accept lower returns in the future if they adopt the blockchain, a perspective that makes the blockchain a threat as much as an opportunity.

"This technology threatens profit margins across the board," Hyperledger's Behlendorf argues.

International Data Corporation estimates that companies will spend $ 1.5 billion in blockchain year, twice the amount of last year, but even companies that believe in technology are reluctant to spend too much, because they have no guarantee of returns.

"Blockchain challenges what you do rather than amplify what you you do, "said Rajart Kandaswamy of Gartner." Technologies like cell phones amplify what you do. The cell phone was an additive for banks. Blockchain as an underlying technology makes you rethink your business processes or even your business model. It will take years before people pass. "

The companies that invest most in blockchain projects are often central players in the industries in which they operate: some of them could be considered intermediaries that the blockchain promised to remove.

Broadridge Financial Solutions One of the major players in the proxy voting sector, he spent about $ 150 million in blockchain and voted by proxy for Banco Santander's annual software meeting, according to CEO Rich Daly. Nasdaq used it to allow transfers of private companies, among other applications.

The decision of the Australian Securities Exchange at the end of the last year to rebuild its equity equity system using blockchain technology could lead to other exchanges of similar software. states that its system could allow transactions to be concluded faster than the current two days when it enters service in 2020 or 2021.

In the United States, another central intermediary is updating its software on a blockchain platform, and expects to go live even before ASX. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a holding company that solves and cancels the vast majority of financial exchanges in the United States, is building a blockchain-based system to record the 15 million credit derivative transactions that it processes on a yearly. The system, now conducted on a more expensive mainframe operated by DTCC, is projected to go live with its first phase of the blockchain project in the first half of next year.

"The industry saw the value of the ledger distributed in terms of its ability to control and share data among participants on a synchronized basis almost in real time," says Jennifer Peve, co-responsible of the DTCC financial strategy office. Blockchain will end up offering participants a "single source of truth on the network" that will make transaction reconciliation easier.

However, Peve says there are limits to technology. The software is not ready to replace DTCC's clearing and settlement equity software, for example, because it is not yet able to process approximately 100 million transactions that pass through the system every day. "It will take some time before it can support those volumes," he says.

Even major banks are exploring blockchain through other avenues, even if they are the early days of most projects. A private company called R3 has built a blockchain software called Corda Enterprise that allows companies to trade syndicated loans, among other possibilities.

JPMorgan Chase developed its own software called Quorum, built on the Ethereum public blockchain, designed to reduce documents and time lag in financial transactions. The software, which can be downloaded from the JPMorgan website, is rather unusual for the bank, whose managing director, Jamie Dimon, has defined Bitcoin as a "fraud". But Dimon has admitted that "the blockchain is real" and is clearly cropping a niche for the bank.

The way these many blockchain projects work together remains a mystery. RA. Farrokhnia, executive director of the Columbia Fintech Program, says that blockchain "still needs its Cisco", referring to the company that built today's Internet switchboard. (Cisco Systems, as it happens, is working on blockchain, but apparently it's not the "Cisco" of it.)

IBM wants to stay at the center of many of these partnerships. In the banking sector, one of the most ambitious projects IBM has worked on is a trade finance consortium in Europe called we.trade. Deutsche Bank, HSBC and seven other banks are leading the project, which went live in June with seven transactions in its first five days.

Commercial financing: banks that lend money to businesses that trade across borders are a heavy process for paper that can take a week or more for settlement of transactions. With we.trade, trades can be adjusted in real time once the transaction conditions are met. There is no guarantee that any platform will become dominant. HSBC also entered into commercial finance agreements on the blockchain Corda and Barclays completed the negotiations with another start-up company.

Finance attracts most of the securities in the blockchain world, but the greatest long-term opportunity could be in supply chain management, which are now drawn on pieces of paper, Excel spreadsheets and incompatible IT systems . The colossus of the Danish expedition A.P. Moller-Maersk is working with IBM on a project called TradeLens that will digitize and standardize shipping documents and place them in a blockchain database.