Lately I’ve done quite some research on blockchain. I’ve been involved in a number of inspiration sessions for our customers, trying to come up with good use cases for blockchain in their respective industries. We’re in the process of defining and executing some exciting PoCs (proof of concepts) right now, mainly in the logistics vertical.

The Ethereum blockchain seems to be(come) the dominant platform for all kinds of initiatives. Ethereum is also doing quite well from a token market value point of view at the moment and that’s not hard to understand. It’s the goto platform for anything that has to do with smart contracts. A lot of current ICOs (initial coin offerings) run their technologies on the Ethereum blockchain. Some of them are good and probably have a bright future, some of them are hyped but basically hot air, and some of them are right out shady and probably scams. But hey, a new crypto sucker is born every day as Microsoft’s blockchain principal architect Marley Gray said during a keynote on a blockchain conference.

On the Microsoft Azure platform, it’s quite easy to setup an Ethereum blockchain. With the CoCo framework, Microsoft has built exciting preview stuff that can run on multiple blockchain platforms. Check out the paper here.

For me it’s clear that the blockchain technology itself is not the interesting part. Of course having immutable records and a consensus model to cut out the middle man is *very* important, but the blockchain itself will become mainstream like any other database technology, like SQL or NoSQL. What makes it worthwhile is the concept of smart contracts. And that’s what the Ethereum blockchain is quite good at. It is however quite hard to develop and test smart contracts. I foresee that in the short term, lots of startups will come up with smart things around smart contracts.

I’ve bumped into two of them that are worthwhile mentioning. Also because they are both legitimate and did their ICO’s in North America:

1. Blockmason. The have developed the Credit Protocol on top of Ethereum, which takes care of a very badly needed smart contract for handling credit (on which this world turns), including the automatic settling of it between parties. They have developed this technology before they did their ICO. And they are SEC compliant, which is a first in crypto land. They have interesting partnerships, like the one with Coral Health who are doing a pilot with their technology on settling payments between doctors, patients and insurance companies. Without the need for a third party. Very interesting technology, for which they have applied for patents. I think lots of initiatives will use their technology to implement similar scenarios. Their token is named BCPT. Checkout Blockmason.io for full details.
2. Etherparty. They have created the technology to make the development of smart contracts easier. Basically they do for smart contracts what WIX did for websites. Without any programming knowledge you can develop smart contracts that run on any compatible blockchain, but the most used one is obviously Ethereum. I foresee that they will come up with lots of out-of-the-box templates for smart contacts making the implementation of blockchain initiatives a lot quicker. Their token is named FUEL. Checkout Etherparty.com for full details.

So, just like we had frameworks on top of SQL databases and integration software, we’re now seeing the rise of smart frameworks and templates on top of blockchain. We’re definitely coming out of the blockchain stoneage. Exciting times!

Cheers, Gijs