Blockchain Industry could be $7 billion, says Bank of America Report

According to a Bank of America report, the worth of blockchain technology could be $ 7 billion in the near future and will provide a major boost to the corporate giants including Amazon and Microsoft.

Kash Rangan, research analyst of Bank of America said that the potential beneficiaries could take the advantage of blockchain technology with existing cloud computing operations and can improve the supply chain operations. Blockchain technology is best suited for some of the world’s largest organisations.

“Amazon will benefit from incremental cloud services demand from Blockchain implementation, while improved supply chain tracking should make Amazon’s retail operations more efficient.”

According to the research report, 2% of corporate servers would be used to run the blockchain at a cost of $5,500 per server annually. Other than supply chain management there are many other potential uses of blockchain technology. “Full products/services have yet not been built out and are not used in production” which leaves the capacities of the blockchain technology to generate real-world capital still unproven.

Blockchain system is one form of the distributor ledger design which can be public or private. Distributed ledger shares data on a distributed, secure, and unalterable ledger. The innovation of the distributed ledger system could take software as a service (SaaS) model to the next level by implementing blockchain as a service (BaaS). Rangan gave the example of Microsoft’s blockchain based platform Azure. According to Rangan “BaaS on Azure offers services such as smart contracts and other third-party apps, and should benefit as the use of blockchain on Azure increases.”

Rangan said that the retail giant Walmart has become the first retailer in the world to use the blockchain technology. Recently BTC Wires reported Walmart has made it compulsory for its vegetable suppliers to upload their data on the blockchain within a year. Once all the suppliers will be on the blockchain it will become effortless to track the inventory and to generate requirements. Walmart is also planning to apply the same rules for the fresh fruits suppliers.

Other companies which can be benefited from the blockchain technology are IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, VMWare, Redfin, LendingTree, and Zillow. Many of these firms have already made major forays into the blockchain industry.