Blockchain market for businesses will grow to $20B in 10 years, report says

The report examines 29 different "use cases" where blockchain-based product lines are emerging across 19 different business sectors — well beyond bitcoin.

Businesses across the globe spent $2.5 billion this year on blockchain, the cryptographic technology that makes digital currencies like bitcoin possible — and by 2025 that will rise to $19.9 billion, predicts a new report.

The report, Blockchain for Enterprise Applications, from market research outfit Tractica, examines market trends, technology developments and industry players in the rapidly evolving sector.

The report examines 29 different “use cases” where blockchain-based product lines are emerging across 19 different business sectors. “Many of [these] offer significant advantages in terms of cost savings, efficiency, security, and compliance compared to traditional systems and business processes,” said principal analyst Jessica Groopman in a statement.

Blockchain is also known as distributed ledger technology because it uses encryption and distributed computing power to create a constantly updated and cryptographically secure record of transactions that’s distributed among all its participants.

Because it generates a trustworthy record of a transaction held by all parties to it, many people see blockchain as the key to moving, tracking and storing all kinds of value and valuable information online — well beyond digital currency.

Blockchain “is enjoying a blossoming beyond cryptocurrency and the transfer of money, to an architecture able to support many types of transactions, from logging an event, to signing a document, to voting, to allocating energy between parties, and far beyond,” said Groopman.

“In the last year alone, over a hundred financial institutions, more than two dozen governments, and countless corporations and venture capitalists have invested more than $1 billion into blockchain startups,” she added.

Groopman concluded by asking readers to see “through the fog of hype” to “the sobering reality that this is a market of extreme nascence and fragmentation; a notable void of in-production or at-scale implementations; and a lack of regulatory, legal, governance, collaborative, economic, digital, and even cultural precedent.”

Despite the hurdles, however, she said that blockchain has the potential to impact a wide variety of industries.

Government

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• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure