1. Blockchain potential impact is real. If successful, Blockchain technologies can transform the way we live our day to day lives. 2. We believe technology is ready for limited applications in Digital Currency, Lightweight financial systems, Ledgers (of identity, ownership, status, and authority), Provenance (e.g. supply chains and other B2B scenarios) and Disintermediation, which we believe will happen in next three years. 3. However, with other use cases, blockchain faces significant challenges such as performance, irrevocability, need for regulation and lack of census mechanisms. These are hard problems and 4. It is not clear whether blockchain can sustain the current level of effort for extended period of 5+ years. There are many startups and they run the risk of running out of money before markets are ready. Failure of startups can inhibit further funding and investments. 5. Value and need of decentralization compared to centralized and semi-centralized alternatives is not clear.

1. Srinath Perera, Ph.D.
VP Research WSO2, Apache Member,
( srinath@wso2.com)
@srinath_perera
Few thoughts about
Future of Blockchain

2. Analysis based on ETAC
!2
This is analysis of blockchain, based on the Emerging
Technology Analysis (ETAC) framework

3. Impact?
• Replace current alternatives to trust that
are time-consuming, expensive, and
weaker (e.g. intermediaries and
government inspections.)
• It is faster, often establishing trust within
a second.
• It is much more secure, guarded by
cryptography algorithms and census data.
• The resulting system is cheaper and more
agile.
!3

4. Blockchain is many Use Cases
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5. Pros and Cons
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6. Challenges
• Limited scalability and latency
• about 8 minutes and about 2 to 3 transactions per second.
• Most use cases are not feasible under these limits.
• Private blockchain have faster algorithms although they provide
lesser guarantees.
• Limited privacy.
• Blockchain only provides pseudo anonymizations.
• However, by analyzing the transaction graph and other related
information, it is often possible to link users to transactions.
• Once one transaction is linked to a user, all his transactions
become known.
• Storage constraints.
• each node must store the full history of the blockchain. This
forestalls lightweight nodes, such as IoT devices
• As time passes, the history becomes larger aggravating the
problem.
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7. Risks
•Irrevocability.
• appeal is not possible
• Some use cases, this can be handled with undo
transaction, but some others (e.g. land registry) mistake
is not reversible without the current owner complying
•Regulator Absence.
• A regulator plays a key role in some use cases.
• Although not popular, regulators play a crucial role in
many systems (e.g. avoid fraud and periamid schemes.
• With Blockchain-based systems it is impossible or
expensive to fill the missing regulator’s role.
•Misunderstood Side Effects.
• impact beyond CS
•Unclear Regulatory Responses.
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8. Feasibility of Use case Categories
!8

9. Read the paper
• A detailed analysis is in our recently published
paper, “A use case centric survey of Blockchain:
status quo and future directions”.
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Thanks for reading!!