During the recent AMCHAM event held at Westin Hyderabad on April 5th 2018, the Blockchain Center of Excellence team from Broadridge Financial Solutions India Private Limited presented a 2 hour session on blockchain, its origins and the impact on business of the future. The session provided the audience with fundamentals of blockchain, how it is being used in enterprises as ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’ with focus on privacy and confidentiality. A key focus of the presentation centered around evaluating the benefit of using blockchain and the importance of network effect as a key driver for blockchain success. Broadridge associates also did a deep dive on public blockchains to permissioned ledgers with real world examples bringing practitioners view.

Blockchain, the technology that underpins, gained prominent attention with the publication of a paper by an anonymous individual or group of individuals going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto which outlined the vision for a decentralized, democratic, peer to peer network for digital cash called bitcoin. The subsequent growth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has fueled tremendous interest in blockchain. Blockchain brings ‘trust to a trust-less system’ through mathematical proof systems combined with secured cryptographic techniques. World Economic Forum has noted blockchain as one of the top five disruptive technologies and suggests that tipping point for the technology would happen by 2027.

Blockchain brings greater transparency and has caught the attention of cryptoenthusiasts, financial services firms, and governments across the world. The technology is now being explored for solving real world problems including fraudulent transactions in real estate, improving provenance in supply chain, improving efficiencies in trade finance, bringing greater transparency in capital markets, accelerating cross-border payments, building decentralized internet amongst many use cases. The hype generated by blockchain also has its pitfalls with regulatory concerns around the growth of cryptocurrency and it’s links to illegal activities, the risks involved in the underlying technology and disillusionment of 90%+ use cases attempted using blockchain having failed.