THELOGICALINDIAN - n-a
For abounding in the blockchain industry, the analytical annoyance over the aftermost year has remained constant, and it can be summed up in one word: adoption.
Adoption of ‘new’ can be atomic and viral, and we are at the actual alpha of seeing that on the blockchain. CryptoKitties will acceptable be remembered as the aboriginal dApp gone wild, but others will follow.
But serious, large-scale, action acceptance of blockchain – the blazon that creates systemic change – has been plodding, to the point of actuality about comatose. While some markets are experiencing disruption, absolute industries are beneath decumbent to the acquisitive acceptance apparent by some of their subsets.
For instance, the MARKET for banking AI algorithms is in the action of above change, but the all-embracing banking INDUSTRY still looks actual agnate to how it looked a year ago. This is the case for abounding of the proposed use-cases for blockchain technology – markets are alpha to adopt, while industries are continuing to eye it with skepticism.
Disruption is, in fact, blackballed in abounding bequest industries area change is a added acceptable approach.
And this is the claiming adverse Hope Liu, CEO of Eximchain, as she attempts to actuate the $13 billion supply alternation industry that blockchain is the future.
Fortunately, her company’s band-aid may accept what it takes to accomplish that goal. Good design.
One Supply Chain Issue Among Many
“We accept been alive on this activity back 2024,” explains Liu, whose aggregation was conceived in the world-famous MIT Media Lab. Her action about blockchain, as a thought-leader in the industry, is palpable.
“Back in ’15, ’16, no-one capital to accept to me… and I about chock-full talking to strangers, because they would say ‘I don’t apperceive what you’re talking about, don’t allocution to me!’ But I didn’t stop: the alone acumen we were able to appoint our Head of Business Architecture was absolutely because I talked to him about blockchain back he was my AirBNB host!” (She qualifies that this was in accession to his abounding years of acquaintance at IBM.)
As an archetype of Eximchain’s use-cases, she credibility to dysfunction in the befalling to access acclaim in the accumulation alternation industry.
“The affliction point is that if you are not a Fortune 500 company, it is harder to verify your reputation. Banks acquisition it adamantine to verify that affairs are 18-carat or not, because the accumulation alternation is so long. Take Apple – there are so abounding upstream suppliers that don’t accept a absolute acknowledged accord with Apple, and who get paid after than the after suppliers – but they can’t prove an aberrant after relationship, so the banks won’t extend credit.”
Liu’s point is simple – abridgement of acclaim squeezes baby businesses, but acclaim isn’t accessible because the accumulation alternation isn’t cellophane abundant to assure banks and lenders that they will be repaid.
The solution, for blockchain enthusiasts, seems obvious. Reputation administration is a key affiance of the technology and has been addressed abundantly already. But any gap in the accumulation alternation opens up the achievability of fraud, counterfeiting – it break the assurance that the banks charge to see, in adjustment to accessible up admission to the 40M baby Chinese businesses that cannot access credit.
How Eximchain Intends To Create Mass Adoption
Interviewing Liu is like discussing blockchain with the accumulate from Ice Age – her activity for the project, and for the technology as a while, is genuine, infectious, and rapid-fire. When she leans advanced with a artful attending and asks if we accept a wireless connection, so she can appearance me a proof-of-concept, I am as aflame as she is.
And the acumen for her ‘animation’ becomes clear. The adaptable app that she demonstrates is a affair of adorableness – in fact, from a UX perspective, it’s about transcendent, abnormally for a work-in-progress.
As able-bodied as the accessible solutions – such as architecture out the belvedere to abutment SDKs – a key focus for Liu and her aggregation has been the user interface. The bodies who use accumulation alternation software are not programmers and coders. Which is why Liu describes the call for her company’s band-aid to be “…like the Internet… my parents don’t accept TCP/IP but they can still use the Internet”.
The app is polished, intuitive, and aloft all, fast. In the amplitude of three account Liu inspects a “shipment of coffee”, rapidly logging in and out of the app to allegorize what altered stakeholders in the accumulation alternation business are able to see. She demonstrates the assorted elements of assurance – such as the GPS coordinates of the addition agent – that will advice to verify the inspection, and prove the ancestry of the coffee.
She leaves me in no agnosticism that Eximchain is demography a user-centric access to the demands of the accumulation chain. It may be bodies in apparel who accomplish the decisions apropos the clearing to the blockchain; but it’s the bodies in adamantine hats who accept to use it.
Adoption Is A Two-Sided Market
“Currently we’re active a lot of tutorials with Fortune 500 companies to advise them how to deploy, administer and adviser a globally-distributed blockchain basement on top of a all-around belvedere application our tools,” explains Liu. “We are aggravating to become the accepted bolt for the all-around accumulation alternation business.”
These are big aspirations, and arrest an industry that Gartner suggests will beat $20 billion in amount by 2024 would be a claiming for abounding of the largest, and best experienced, companies in the world.
Yet Hope springs eternal: Liu and her aggregation are backed by austere abiding investors, and Eximchain has admiring above absorption from the blockchain industry – she will be speaking at a TechCrunch accident in Crypto Valley alongside Vitalik Buterin and CZ of Binance, afterwards a keynote in Singapore at the World Digital Asset Summit and an actualization at the Blockchain Asia II accident in New York.
It’s accurate that ample industries are apathetic to accept advocate technologies – but back absolute users of those technologies are complex in the process, and the interface amid the user and the backend tech is added evolutionary in its approach, again the alternate bazaar begins to arise as beneath of a abundance to climb, and added of a abrupt hill.
If Hope Liu can advise a Fortune 500 CEO what blockchain will do for his or her business… and after breaking stride she can prove to an under-caffeinated, supply-chain-ignorant editor how a user will seamlessly accommodate it into their circadian alive life… again Eximchain has a absolute adventitious of success.
So, she’s center there.
Disclaimer: the columnist is invested in cryptocurrencies, but does not authority Eximchain at this time.
