Trend 1: The application of blockchain industry is accelerating, and it is spreading from digital currency to non-financial fields.
Blockchain technology, as a general technology, is penetrating into other fields from digital currency at an accelerated pace, and it is integrated with innovation in all walks of life. We believe that the application of blockchain in the future will be driven by two camps. On the one hand, the IT camp began to enjoy information, with low-cost credit as the core, and gradually covered digital assets and other fields. On the other hand, the cryptocurrency camp started from currency, and gradually advanced to asset-side management, securities depository and other fields, and spread to application fields such as credit reporting and general information enjoyment.
Trend 2: Enterprise application is the main battlefield of blockchain, and alliance chain/private chain will become the mainstream direction.
At present, the practical application of enterprises is concentrated in the field of digital currency, which belongs to the virtual economy. We believe that the application of blockchain in the future will be divorced from reality, and more traditional enterprises will use blockchain technology to reduce costs, improve cooperation efficiency and stimulate the growth of the real economy, which will be the main battlefield for the application of blockchain in the future.
Different from public chains, in enterprise applications, people pay more attention to the controllability, compliance, performance and security of blockchain. Therefore, we believe that alliance chain and private chain, two strongly managed blockchain deployment modes, are more suitable for enterprises to use in application landing and are the mainstream technical direction of enterprise-level applications.
Trend 3: The application of diversified technical solutions will continuously optimize the blockchain performance.
In the future, blockchain applications will develop from single to multi-directional. Billing, payment, insurance, supply chain and other different applications will have great differences in real-time, high concurrency, delay, throughput and so on. This will lead to diversified technical solutions. We believe that blockchain technology is far from finalized and will continue to evolve in the future, and there is room for improving efficiency in technical links such as * * * identification algorithm, service segmentation, processing method and organization form.
Trend 4: The combination of blockchain and cloud computing is getting closer and closer, and BaaS is expected to become a public trust infrastructure.
Cloud computing is the general trend. We believe that the combination of blockchain and cloud is also an inevitable trend. There are two modes for the combination of blockchain and cloud, one is that blockchain is in the cloud, and the other is that blockchain is in the cloud. The latter, namely BaaS, Blockchain-as-a-Service means that cloud service providers directly provide blockchain as a service to users. In the future, cloud service enterprises will increasingly integrate blockchain technology into the ecological environment of cloud computing. By providing BaaS function, the deployment cost of enterprise application blockchain will be effectively reduced, and the initial threshold for innovation and entrepreneurship will be lowered.
Trend 5: Blockchain security issues are increasingly prominent, and security protection requires overall consideration of technology and management.
Mathematically speaking, the blockchain system is almost perfect, with the advantages of openness and transparency, difficulty in tampering, reliable encryption and resistance to DDoS attacks. However, from the engineering point of view, its security is still restricted by infrastructure, system design, operation management, privacy protection, technology update iteration and so on. In the future, it is necessary to consider the overall situation from the aspects of technology and management, strengthen basic research and overall protection, and ensure application safety.
Trend 6: The demand for blockchain cross-chain is increasing, and the importance of interconnection is highlighted.
With the in-depth application of blockchain, enterprises or industries in the fields of payment and settlement, logistics traceability, medical records and identity verification will establish their own blockchain systems. We believe that cross-chain cooperation and interoperability among these blockchain systems is an inevitable trend in the future. It can be said that cross-chain technology is the key for blockchain to realize value Internet, and the interconnection of blockchain will become an increasingly important issue.
Trend 7: Blockchain competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and patent competition has become an important area of competition.
With the increase of participants, the competition of blockchain will become more and more fierce, and the competition is all-round, including technologies, models, patents and other dimensions. We believe that in the future, enterprises will strengthen the layout of patents in blockchain. Since 20 14, the number of patent applications for blockchain has exploded. Blockchain patents are mainly distributed in the United States in North America, Britain in Europe and China and South Korea in Asia, and this pattern will be maintained in the future. The patent gap between China and the United States is narrowing, and the number of applications for 20 16 in China has surpassed that in the United States. It is foreseeable that the competition for blockchain patents will become more and more fierce in the future.
Trend 8: Blockchain investment continues to be hot, and the accumulated risk of token crowdfunding model deserves attention.
Blockchain has become a hot spot sought after by the capital market. Future investment will continue the upward trend of 20 14 to 20 16. Different from other financing models in the field of science and technology, a model called "token crowdfunding" has emerged in the blockchain field, namely Initial Coin Issuance (ICO), which is a crowdfunding method for startups to issue tokens to raise funds. With the increase in the transaction volume of token crowdfunding, the risks of many projects such as lack of audit, huge value fluctuation and being on the verge of supervision will increase, which is worthy of attention. A group of friends had a private chat with me this afternoon and asked about the so-called gold chain. We need to rely on the mode of 1, 2 2, 4 4, 16 to make profits. This is an obvious pyramid scheme, but there are still many friends who have just entered the currency circle. Friends who just understand the blockchain will be deceived, hoping to recognize the essence and be responsible for their own funds!
Trend 9: There is a conflict between blockchain technology and supervision, but the contradiction is expected to be further reconciled.
The decentralization, disintermediation and anonymity of blockchain are not in harmony with the traditional enterprise management and government supervision system. But we should also see the opportunities brought by blockchain to supervision. We believe that in the future, enterprises will actively meet the regulatory requirements in terms of technical solutions and model design, which will not only achieve compliance operations, but also greatly save the cost of regulatory compliance. We also believe that in the future, global regulatory authorities will also embrace the blockchain as a new regulatory technology and use new technologies to improve the effectiveness of government supervision.
Trend 10: Reputation is the core requirement of blockchain, and the importance of standards and specifications is increasingly prominent.
In the future value delivery network based on blockchain, we will completely use algorithms and software to build a trust foundation. However, we believe that this is far from enough, and standards need to be formulated to increase trust in blockchain. In the future, the standards of blockchain will standardize the technology and governance of blockchain from the user's point of view, business-oriented, and from the dimensions of smart contract, knowledge mechanism, private key security, and authority management, so as to enhance the credibility of blockchain and add weight to the trust of blockchain.
abstract
The above are the top ten trends summarized. To sum up, there are four points: First, the blockchain is the foundation of the value network and gradually becomes an indispensable part of the future Internet. Second, with the increasingly rich application scenarios, applications will promote the continuous improvement of blockchain technology, and the combination of blockchain and cloud will become increasingly close. Third, although the blockchain is mathematically complete, it also has security problems. In the future, we need to strengthen safety in engineering and management, and also need standards to improve credibility. Fourth, blockchain technology will gradually adapt to the requirements of future regulatory policies and gradually become an important tool for regulatory technology.