The Mystery of Enterprise Blockchain

Years after the first pilot projects for enterprise blockchain, it’s difficult to get a clear sense of their success

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

I’m trying to solve a business mystery: are private blockchains effective in addressing enterprise use cases?

This sounds like it should be easy enough to figure out.

Believe me, that’s what I thought.

But the more you look, the more confusing it gets.

Let’s start with the reasoning that would suggest the answer is “yes”:

1. Walmart Canada touts a success story in leveraging a private blockchain to reduce the rate at which supplier invoices require manual reconciliation from 70% to 1%
2. In 2018 BMW kicked off a pilot to leverage blockchain in managing cobalt in its supply chain; at the end of last year it announced a new blockchain project to better manage financial operations and (eventually) bolster its customer loyalty program
3. Another success story comes from a blockchain implementation to better manage Microsoft Xbox’s royalty payments by cutting payment times from 45 days to 4 minutes

There are many more stories like this, but let’s look closer at these examples.