This is a guest opinion post from Tram Vo, Founder and COO of MOBI.
While considered by many to be one of the most difficult years for business, 2020 has been a catalyst for enterprise blockchain, notably for distributed and decentralized mobility. Call me biased. For both public and private sectors, the pandemic amplified the need to accelerate their digital transformation to emerge stronger, more efficient, and trusted. Blockchain can accelerate these transformations. The catch is scalable blockchain is a multi-team sport and requires cross-ecosystem collaboration. In 2021 killer apps will be about “collaboration to conquer.” Divided we fail.
Research and development take time, and so do regulatory adjustments, socialization, and collaboration. Early proofs-of-concept (PoCs) within corporate silos showed that while it was easy to register an asset on a chain and that various services could be replicated, there were no efficient, agreed ways to communicate, share, and settle with third parties outside the silo. Business protocols, standards, naming conventions, and, above all, networks for ecosystem business collaboration didn’t exist. While siloed blockchain applications could be built, they couldn’t scale. Without an ecosystem and cross-industry participation, the distributed applications had nothing to plug into, nothing to share, and not a lot of value to offer. Therefore no killer app. The iron rules of network economics apply to enterprise blockchain — the value of the network grows as the square of the participants and the square of one is still one.
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