Enterprise blockchain technology concerns the use of distributed ledger technology for businesses, governments, and organizations to innovate in a variety of areas, such as scalability, transparency, the development of decentralized solutions, the creation of permissioned networks, and B2B payments. Here are five enterprise-friendly blockchain platforms that are disrupting their industries, while driving innovation and fueling wider adoption.
Vechain
VeChain is a blockchain platform focusing on supply chain management and business practice innovations. Originally launched on the Ethereum network but since moved to its own proprietary platform, VeChain allows for companies to receive and distribute transparent and verifiable data from throughout the entire supply chain journey. Its system can work on a multitude of products such as food, medicine, clothing, luxury goods, temperature sensitive goods, or anything else that needs to be verified as legitimate. With knockoffs of high end and luxury items being a multi-billion dollar industry, VeChain offers a solution that allows customers to feel confident in the legitimacy of the item they are purchasing while enabling companies to be held accountable for the quality of their products.
Concordium
Keeping the identity of customers, clients, and users private is extremely important across many industries, but often these identities need to be validated or shared in some capacity to complete a service. This is where Concordium comes into play. Concordium is a privacy-centric, public, and permissionless blockchain that is built specifically for businesses and governments.
Utilizing smart contracts and a privacy-preserving concept known as zero-knowledge proofs, Concordium allows users and businesses to verify information without having to disclose it publicly. Concordium was designed to be easily integrated into business operations and is regulatory compatible, which is essential for enterprises to be able to access the network. The data transmitted on Concordium is anonymized for privacy, but the platform has the option to reveal the identity of a user if requested by a legal authority. The Concordium platform is preparing to launch in early 2021 and has a beta version up and available for testing.
Extrimian
Extrimian is a new enterprise blockchain solution catering to governments and businesses. Created as a joint venture between IOVLabs, the company responsible for the RSK Bitcoin sidechain, and Argentine firm Grupo Sabra, Extrimian is a blockchain enterprise cloud platform. Extrimian is especially useful to centralized organizations looking to integrate blockchain technology into their current operations, and allows for the easy creation of permissioned or semi-permissioned networks. With these networks, governments and businesses will be able to interact with decentralized applications, but with their own pre-determined permissions and rules. If an organization has a problem that can be solved via blockchain technology, Extrimian is the perfect platform to bridge the divide.
Polkadot
While the interoperable blockchain network founded by Gavin Wood is synonymous with defi, Polkadot has also been designed for enterprise usage. The Substrate framework that Polkadot is built upon is highly scalable, allowing businesses to use it to build applications that can process thousands of transactions per second within a low fee environment. One of Germany’s leading energy research organizations is already using Polkadot for this purpose, and as the network matures this year, and developer toolkits are standardized, deploying enterprise apps will become much easier. Expect to see a number of businesses plant a flag in Polkadot’s ecosystem this year and tap into its unrivaled ability to support cross-chain swaps of assets ranging from cryptos to tokenized fiat currencies.
Hedera Hashgraph
Designed with the needs of enterprises paramount, Hedera’s public ledger uses a custom consensus mechanism that can support over 10,000 TPS. This places it firmly in the enterprise bracket, and indeed many of the use cases envisioned for Hashgraph are business oriented. One of the applications where Hedera should prove its worth is in the tokenization of assets. It enables tokenized stocks, synths, and commodities to be traded within a regulated environment, with full KYC baked in where required for enterprise purposes. With the cost of transferring any tokenized asset on Hedera’s public chain standing at less than a cent, it’s ideally suited to businesses that will be involved in high volume trading, providing all the benefits of blockchain without the crippling fees that have impaired Ethereum.
Each of the above blockchain projects is targeting the enterprise market from a different angle, focusing on purpose-built solutions that meet the needs of digital businesses. If wide-scale enterprise adoption of blockchain materializes, it will be thanks in no small part to the efforts of these projects.
