As each year passes the blockchain industry is maturing. Positive sentiment is growing and both consumers and businesses are showing greater awareness and confidence in the underlying blockchain technology.
In March 2020, Deloitte released a study surveying 1400 professionals found the following interesting facts 55% percent of businesses rate blockchain technology in the top 5 priorities. Blockchain is not just a tool to improve efficiency, but it is now recognised as a way improve processes and other functions. 80% of businesses surveyed also stated, that any delay in blockchain implementation would cause their market competitiveness to suffer.
On the contrary, the Deloitte survey found that 50% of respondents think blockchain is ‘overhyped’, which has grown from 40% in 2018. Another declining trend found was that blockchain would provide added security over their existing IT systems, with 65% thinking this was the case, decreasing from 70% the year before.
Blockchain adoption was also covered in Deloitte’s survey, where a growing number of businesses are implementing blockchain solutions into production. This figure grew from 23% in 2019, to 39% in 2020. It also found the larger the company revenue, the larger the blockchain adoption rate.
Business Spending on Blockchains is Growing
The projected spending in 2020 on blockchain technology is expected to reach $4.3 billion which is nearly 60% growth over 2019. Forecasts show that continued blockchain spending growth by firms will reach over $15 billion by 2023.
The Expensive Scaling Problems with Current Blockchains
Since April 2020, the cost to use the Ethereum blockchain has increased 500% to an average gas price of ~16 Gwei, which is about 0.000003712 USD (See Converter). We then sum all the fees on the Ethereum blockchain and divide it by the number of transactions, which gives us the “Median Transaction Fee” that normal people pay.
In the 48 hours leading up to June 30 (2020), the median transaction fee on the Ethereum blockchain spiked 60%, climbing from $0.23, up to $0.37… Median fees on Ethereum just reached their highest point since August 2018.
Source: Crypto Potato
In order to fix this gas pricing issue, EIP-1559 has been proposed which will introduce a dynamic pricing system. This Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) is still in draft stage.
Along with Ethereum being expensive, it is also slow to process, with transactions taking between 10 to 15 seconds (currently 13.28s). Ethereum 2.0 will fix these scaling issues. The only problem is that it will take two years to deliver. Vitalik has advised that to increase data throughput people should use ZK-Rollups for the next 2 years as an interim Layer-2 scaling solution. After this period, another upgrade will deliver the ability to increase computation.
Read more: Why Ethereum Projects that Need to Scale are Choosing the Solana Blockchain
Solana is Building the Blockchain Infrastructure of the Future
- Max. Transactions Per Second: 59.490
- Block times: 400ms
- Cost per Transaction: $0.00001
- MainNet Decentralised Validator Nodes: ~109
Solana will scale as hardware becomes faster and cheaper. It is ready now in MainNet Beta.
Building the Next Billion User Application on Blockchain
Will the Kin ecosystem scale to a Billion Users?
In recent news, Kin will be migrating it’s ~4 million user ecosystem to the Solana Blockchain. It currently has 57 monthly active apps, that is made up of 3.1 million unique user spends & 4.6 million unique user earns. You can see the Kin Stats page for more info. Read more on the Kin Ecosystem and how Solana is the right choice here.
Will it be stable coin and wallet app that is user by over a Billion Users?
Libra “represents a new blockchain-based financial infrastructure that aims to simplify global money movement and commerce, and to foster financial inclusion among those on the periphery of the banking system.”
Source: Deloitte
Perhaps the next Billion User app will be the next addictive coin collection game, a gambling app, or even a De-Fi application. Over at DappRadar you can see some of the app user metrics, the highest ranking app has over ~80k users per month!
When will we see Blockchain Apps overtake Traditional Apps in adoption and usage metrics?
This will likely be a slow journey as the technology catches up and global users become more comfortable with blockchain. As mentioned in the Deloitte case above, with over half of businesses focusing on blockchain as a means to bring efficiency to their operations and a 60% growth in blockchain investment, it may only be 5 years until we see Blockchain Apps become mainstream. Solana has blockchain infrastructure scaling solved, now the App Developer race is on to serve the next Billion Users.
