Innovation Matters: Insights On The Latest Disruptive Technologies

In the last year, all the hype has been on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but what’s been emerging in the background is blockchain’s diverse capabilities. These include the ability to store asset ownership rights, settle payments across diverse ecosystems, and automate transactions through smart contracts.

What does “industrializing the blockchain” mean?

Blockchain technology can wield a significant impact across industries and sectors. It can be used to make supply chains more efficient and also enable disruptive new business models, especially concerning ownership and usage of shared assets.

“When we talk about industrializing the blockchain, we mean taking this really amazing, great cryptography and value movement and making it fit for business problems.” – Paul Brody, EY Global Innovation Blockchain Leader

Bitcoin, the world’s first blockchain, was created as an alternative to the traditional financial system. It was designed to allow parties to transact with each other in a secure, verifiable, and tamper-resistant way without having to trust a bank or central authority. Removing traditional intermediaries significantly reduced the time and processing fees required to execute a transaction.

We believe these core characteristics of blockchain technology will allow modern enterprises to extract more value from their business operations. Our view is that blockchains will do for multi-enterprise networks what enterprise resource planning did for single enterprises. Companies and their partners will be able operate from a single source of truth. Transactions between multiple parties will be secure and transparent. Automation and business logic can be embedded into smart processes to enable greater efficiencies and new business models.

The automotive industry: an example

Industrializing the blockchain is one more disruption hitting the auto industry. In the last few years, players across the industry have faced perhaps their biggest challenges to date, from connected cars to the advent of electric and autonomous vehicles.

Across the traditional automotive value chain, blockchain has the potential to enhance efficiency and collaboration (e.g., through synchronization of supply chains, tracking of component provenance, or immutable storage of vehicle usage and maintenance history).

For example, the automotive industry is being impacted by several significant external disruptions: electrification, autonomy, connectivity, and shared usage models – leading to the emergence of new players and new business models. But these business models are in their infancy and are suffering from a number of challenges that blockchain can help address, including:

• Increasing scalability of shared fleets by allowing fractional ownership and external investment

• “Disaggregating” electric vehicles into core components (e.g., chassis, battery, and onboard systems) and managing the value chain and economics of those separately

• Allowing many different mobility providers to combine their offerings into a “mobility-as-a-service” offering allowing seamless travel across cities

• Leveraging blockchain as a key enabler through tokenization of assets, allowing seamless peer-to-peer transactions and removing middle- and back-office functions through smart contracts.

But there are still some big questions the industry must explore and answer: Are consumers ready for new business models such as fractional ownership? How will consumers interact with the blockchain and will they trust its integrity?

“The trick is to move at the pace of the customer – to know when the customer is ready.” – Philipp Schartau, EY Strategy, Mobility Innovation and Growth Director, and EY Tesseract Platform Lead

What others can learn from the auto industry

Many of the things we are expecting in the auto industry would apply elsewhere. For example, the concepts of fractional ownership and shared use can be applied to assets in multiple industries. If the asset can be shared or technology makes the asset shareable, the fractional ownership recorded on a blockchain and access controls implemented with the Internet of Things are feasible. Homes and cars are among the first items being shared in this model, but we expect that many other assets, such as boats, offices, storage spaces, and other high-value assets, could be shared as well.

What’s next for blockchain?

While a lot of people are still following the ups and downs of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, some of the biggest development work around this technology is happening in the enterprise. People are beginning to envision large-scale industrial applications, process automation, and the introduction of smart contracting that we are working on. Blockchain is going to emerge as an enabling technology for new business models for greater efficiency and transparency.

While widespread adoption of blockchains has its challenges, such as scalability, transaction speed, and privacy, large strides are being made to address these issues. Blockchain developers have been experimenting with off-chain data storage solutions to optimize the amount of data passing through blockchains to improve scalability. Innovations to the consensus mechanisms securing transactions are being developed to increase speed and security. Zero-knowledge proofs are promising to be the key to maintaining transaction privacy on public blockchains.

“This is the year we’ll see blockchains used for business operations.” – Paul Brody, EY Global Innovation Blockchain Leader

Looking forward, we believe that four major revolutions will significantly affect the blockchain space. First, for large-scale enterprise applications, we will see a shift away from applications running on private blockchains to those running on a public blockchain such as Ethereum. Second, application functionality will shift from merely notarization and synchronization of events to tokenization of assets. Third, we will see a shift away from using cryptocurrencies to transactions being conducted with tokenized fiat currency. Last, we predict a consolidation of parallel blockchains into industry-wide ecosystem blockchains.

In short, we think the long-term future of blockchains is to become a public utility that enables business transactions.

The views expressed are the opinions of authors Paul Brody and Philipp Schartau. This is an abstract of an article originally published by EY in the “Innovation Matters” series and is republished by permission.