5 things only massively scalable enterprise blockchains can do

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After a dark few years in the wake of the FTX collapse and the digital currency winter that followed, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and optimism is returning to the enterprise blockchain industry.

This time, the focus is squarely on utility and scalable ledgers. While niche applications can exist on limited chains like BTC and Ethereum, these low-throughput, high-fee ledgers won’t cut it for genuinely game-changing use cases.

Let’s unpack some of those use cases and explore why only unbounded, high-capacity, low-fee public blockchains can deliver the better world we want to see.

Real-time payment processing at scale

Bitcoin was designed as an electronic cash system, and Satoshi Nakamoto had payments in mind when he released it. You don’t need to read further than the title and abstract of the white paper to realize that.

However, Visa (NASDAQ: V) alone processes 5,000 transactions per second on average and can handle up to 65,000 during peak times. BTC, with its limited capacity of seven transactions per second, will never be able to handle that, and the Lightning Network is not a viable solution: opening and closing channels is too costly, and it suffers from multiple security vulnerabilities.

Considering Visa is only a fraction of all payments globally, any enterprise blockchain that hopes to act as the backbone for global payments will have to scale unboundedly. Thankfully, at least one blockchain can do so.

Scalable blockchains like BSV can go much further than handling existing payments. They can also facilitate billions of new tiny payments in micro and nano payments. There’s no telling what new business models this could lead to or what economic growth could result from it.

Managing the Internet of Things (IoT)

The IoT has become a big deal in the last few years. As devices from cars to household appliances come online, the IoT is expected to grow to 75 billion devices by 2025.

In addition to providing a secure network on which these devices can communicate, scalable enterprise blockchains can enable decentralized control and authentication. One big fear about the IoT is it will put unprecedented power in the hands of governments and corporations, but permissionless ledgers with the rules enforced by honest nodes that are free to join and leave the network can mitigate some of those fears.

Public blockchains like BSV can also enable devices to pay each other via micropayments. Think of a smart car paying a toll booth automatically or agricultural devices paying IoT weather sensors for hyper-accurate data on weather conditions. Better yet, your smart home could sell excess power generated via solar panels back to the grid and receive payment there and then.

Blockchains can also help manage the immense amount of data IoT devices generate. It’s estimated that IoT networks generate 73.1 ZB of data annually, and that’s in the networks’ infancy. Learn more about blockchain data processing superpowers here.

Enhancing global supply chain efficiency

Every transaction on a public ledger leaves an immutable time-stamped record. This increases transparency in all sorts of industries, including one that badly needs it: global logistics and supply chains.

Firms like UNISOT already use enterprise blockchain technology to make supply chains more transparent and efficient. These efforts involve taking all the fragmented pieces on different private databases and uniting them on a scalable public ledger. Once everything is visible, waste can be eliminated, inefficiencies can be dealt with, and real-time visibility into who has what and where can become a reality.

Applications like Trace, created by Gate2Chain in collaboration with IBM (NASDAQ: IBM), already show how this is possible at scale. In addition to giving a real-time view into supply chains, they enable authentication of provenance, making it possible to prevent counterfeiting and theft. That’s a growing problem in the food industry, among many others.

This approach to solving real problems will ultimately cause blockchain to succeed. And big, global issues require scalable solutions. We’re not talking thousands of transactions per second here—we’re talking millions and billions.

Revolutionizing the Internet and computer security

Think about the average user experience on the Internet today: endless popups, frustrating logins, paywalls, and surveillance capitalism run amock. It isn’t fun anymore, and with the deluge of deepfakes and AI-generated content crippling search engines and flooding social media platforms, it’s only going to get worse.

While scalable blockchains can’t fix everything wrong with the Internet, they can mitigate some of the problems and eliminate others. Imagine having a blockchain-based identity linked to a browser wallet. Instead of signing up for every site and logging in repeatedly, you can authenticate using your blockchain ID. The site might not even know who you are, but they’d know you’re a verified person and could grant access based on this.

Not only would such a system dramatically reduce the number of account hacks, which occur because centralized databases that store login details are breached, but it would massively improve the user experience. Fancy playing a game online? Use your wallet to verify your age and play away. Want to read an article in the Wall Street Journal? Make a $0.30 payment from your wallet, and the paywall disappears—no signup or subscription is required.

Yet, this only touches the surface level the average Internet user interacts with. On a deeper level, enterprise blockchain technology can alter the fundamental architecture of the Internet. Right now, you make a ping request, and a third-party server serves you, usually in an Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) data center. Scalable blockchains mean you could ping any number of decentralized nodes, make micropayments, and be served your content privately. Likewise, they wouldn’t harvest your data along the way.

There’s much more to it than this, too. If you’re interested in digging deeper, look at how applications like LaMint are changing the game for content creators or how Sentinel Node by CERTIHASH is revolutionizing cybersecurity using scalable blockchain technology. None of these apps would be possible without massive scaling and minute fees; that’s probably why they built on BSV!

A more transparent, efficient financial system

If you’re in any way adjacent to the blockchain industry, you’ve probably heard of tokenization. TradFi heavyweights like Larry Fink are touting its benefits as institutions and governments experiment in all kinds of ways with tokenized currencies, bonds, and other assets.

What’s slowly emerging is a vision for a radically different financial system involving total transparency, peer-to-peer transactions, permissionless accessibility, and fractionalized ownership, to mention just a few elements.

All of this is easier to understand with an example. Imagine you are paid to your wallet in a digital currency, such as the central bank digital currency (CBDC) of your country. You can pay your bills as usual, but you can do much more. Your mortgage, car title, and other obligations are linked to your private wallet, so you can pay a little extra towards those if you wish.

However, you can also buy stocks and shares, bonds, or whatever you want to invest in or ping some money to a loved one anywhere in the world. When it comes to tax time, you simply download your transaction history and hand it over to your accountant or an approved AI agent to balance the books.

Sounds much easier than the endless logins, data downloads, and permissioned systems we deal with today, right? That’s the point. Yet again, that’s only scratching the surface. On a deeper level, fee-gouging middlemen would be eliminated from money transfers and transactions, financial crimes and scams would be easier to spot and prosecute thanks to the blockchain’s time-stamped records, and buying, selling, and transferring ownership of anything would be much easier.

Fundamentally, scalable enterprise blockchains and tokenization enable a new financial system: open, accessible, and transparent. Right now, the vested interests are trying to build proprietary versions of these on private blockchains they control. However, they’ll soon realize they have an interoperability problem and turn to scalable public blockchains to solve it.

Summary: It’s time for scalable blockchain tech to shine

I’m not alone when I say I’ve had enough of meme coin pump and dumps, exchange hacks, and yet more VC-backed blockchains promising the moon and delivering little.

It’s time for this era to end and for the true gems to shine: scalable, public enterprise blockchains that enable all kinds of peer-to-peer transactions and all the fantastic applications that can be built on top of them.

Humanity deserves what scalable blockchain technology offers the world. Thankfully, not everybody sold out, and the world we envision is fast becoming a reality!

Watch: Bitcoin for practical use on CoinGeek Weekly Livestream with Brendan Lee