Another article –you guessed it- about Blockchain

Blockchain is becoming an unexpected surprise in 2018…
It has been an explosion of events and news about the technology.
And neglecting such a fact would be a mistake so let’s take a look a bit deeper…

In meetup.com, we can find many groups focused on this technology.

The most popular in Belgium are: Blockchain Brussels, Blockchain Vlaanderen and Hive Blockchain Society. There are also numerous workshops and courses such as Really get the blockchain (London) and Blockchain in practice (already passed).

Several websites such as CIO.com point out that based on the current success of the ongoing pilots, blockchain will soon have a positive impact on the companies.

However, what is the trick to figure out whether you need this technology?

Yeah… sorry… I must say it… hire us to guide you in the process! ;)

But maybe, you are the kind of cowboy forever alone who wants to figure it out by her/himself.
I am personally in love with the  decision-making diagram below....

The source of the image can be found here.

I also invite you to visit this medium blogpost from Sebastien Meunier to dig into the topic.

Probably if you remain sceptic about this 2018 buzzword, your next question is … can we find real use cases?

With a quick search in Google and the keywords “Blockchain landscape”, you will realise that you are not alone on this journey and understand that there is a considerable amount of money invested in this business.

If you do not spend enough time, you might conclude that this is all about cryptocurrency. But it’s far from reality. Blockchain is more than cryptocurrency. 

In this world, with a very strong movement in favour of healthier food consumption, blockchain is penetrating strongly. We can find several examples in the food industry such as:

• Provenance : a website that proposes Blockchain as the solution for transparency in product supply chains.

• ZhongAn : besides inspiring us for the title, this article explains how ZhongAn developed this blockchain technology to track the origin of the chickens.

• WWF: Same than ZhongAn, but proposing the tracking of tuna.

So what is happening in Belgium?

• Vrije Universiteit Brussel started their own project: NRGcoin — Smart Contract for green energy.
• WeTrade: and indeed, it’s about trading. And KBC is playing a role there.
• Port of Antwerp: where they are using to track that containers end up in the hands of the rightful truck driver.

Some people though argues that Belgium might be lagging behind in BlockChain projects.
You can check this enriching discussion started by Laurens van Reiijen.

But this is not all… we recently learned that IBM and Danish shipping giant Maersk are starting a New York-based venture.

Long story short, Blockchain is about tracing the story of something in a transparent, uncorrupted and reliable way.

Do you need a deeper understanding of the technology? Just ask and let’s share our crypto-journey!

Note 1: are you a Blockchain developer? We are recruiting!

Note 2: This is part of a series of posts that Design is Dead started “2018, an exciting year”.