9 out of 10 Blockchain Trials Go Nowhere

Chris Skinner, Chairman at The Financial Services Club

27.02.2018 07:30 am

Blockchain

I just read an interesting new report from Deloitte about blockchain.

They tracked the history of 86,034 blockchain projects hosted on GitHub since 2009 to pull out “key lessons” on where the blockchain industry is going and its long-term prospects. Here are some of the highlights:

More than 26,000 blockchain projects were started in 2016, of which 9,000 were started by corporations, research institutions and start-ups;
In 2010, organisations developed less than 1 percent of all projects but, by 2017, their blockchain projects accounted for 11 percent;
Organisation-owned projects also tend to be updated more frequently than those developed by users, and are reportedly five times more likely to be copied, implying that the blockchain community has deemed them most relevant;
Financial services firms are leading the way in blockchain, with the most commercial use cases in the marketplace;
Financial services firms are either a committer and a watcher. The committer makes commits, or contributions to code, while the watcher follows the development of a project without making code contributions;
Financial services firms are actively monitoring GitHub, presumably looking for promising blockchain projects to acquire under the radar;
Only 8% of projects started still survive; in other words, 92% of blockchain projects fail or were started as an experiment;

The average life span of a project is about one year, with the highest mortality rate occurring within the first six months;
C++ is the most popular programming language for cryptocurrency and blockchain project; however, Go (Google’s own language) is gaining steam; and
San Francisco is the most prolific city for blockchain development, followed by London, New York, and then Beijing and Shanghai.

If you’re interested in blockchain developments, you might do well to checkout the whole PDF report.

Meantime, if you’re still hungry for blockchain stats, here’s a nice infographic from Pearson Online Learning in conjunction with Maryville University: