In TABB Group’s latest research, “Blockchain: Overcoming First Mover Disadvantage,” CEO and report author Larry Tabb discusses the various challenges in driving blockchain adoption and sets out a direction forward.
Tabb believes that tability to decentralise trust, develop consensus-driven ledgers, and re-engineer core infrastructure away from old and legacy technologies has the potential to drastically transform the economics of the industry and conceivably the economics of financial transactions globally. But he is not convinced that tried and tested software adoption schemas to blueprint the implementation of blockchain are suitable.
The research explains that blockchain technology will only be successful if used by a quorum of market participants, which creates a perverse environment where the first movers experience penalisation rather than incentives.
Tabb believes that to overcome these disadvantages, adoption needs to be managed in stages by different types of enterprises with success measured at multiple levels, including: the underlying protocols, the industry-specific protocols, and finally, the development of solutions to free-ride on not only industry-standard protocols but industry-horizontal infrastructure.
“Blockchain has the power to radically shift the economics on Wall Street and around the world, but it does come with investment risks that most financial firms will be unable to overcome if they do not correctly implement the technology in these stages,” says Tabb. “This has significant ramifications over who will win and lose in the blockchain/distributed ledger community and how this technology will be implemented. It is unlikely that any firms will make decisions to embrace blockchain that could be influenced by either competition or any factors outside their control.”
