The Forbes annual Blockchain 50 is on its second outing. It lists the companies making the biggest strides in blockchain, and most of them are valued in the billions of dollars. Indeed, to appear on the list, Forbes says, “To qualify, Blockchain 50 members must be generating no less than $1 billion in revenue annually or be valued at $1 billion or more.
There are some surprising names that turn up in the Blockchain 50, if only because on the face of it they have little to do with blockchain.
For example, De Beers is on the list. The diamond giant’s new software, Tracr, follows diamonds through the supply chain as they are mined, cut, polished and sold and tens of thousands of stones are being registered per month.
Foxconn makes the iPhone trade-finance venture, Chained Finance, pays more than 20 electronics suppliers using digital coins minted on the Ethereum blockchain. As a result the costs have dropped from annual percentage rates as high as 24% to a mere 10%.
Dole Foods is another blockchain adopter. It is using it across all vegetable processing, for millions of pounds of lettuce, spinach and coleslaw. Customers at Walmart can now check where their fruit comes from by scanning a code used by farmers. It is soon expanding this use of blockchain to its fruit.
LVMH, the luxury goods brand, is using blockchain technology for traceability and proof of authenticity. Among its brands, Louis Vuitton is already tracking millions of its products in an effort to reduce counterfeiting.
The United Nations, a 75-year-old organisation is using a number of blockchain initiatives, including one that is intended to combat warlords who steal aid using pilfered ID cards, the UN has over the past two years disbursed funds to 106,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, using blockchain-verified iris scans instead of ID cards.
As Forbes says in its introduction to the Top 50, “Blockchain started as a way to move bitcoin from point A to point B, but it is now being used by a host of big companies to monitor and move any number of assets around the world as easily as sending an email.”
From the instantaneous settlement of German government bonds to verifying the provenance of diamonds mined in Africa and bringing liquidity to a small supplier of sliding shower doors in Zhongshan, China, this year’s members have largely moved beyond the theoretical benefits of blockchain, to generating very real revenues and cost savings.