Blockchain makes inroads into big business

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

A London blockchain startup founded four years ago and still with only 30 employees boasts an impressive list of big business clients – including KLM, Toyota, Shell and Barclays.

Applied Blockchain says it offers “end-to-end blockchain solutions”. The company has a great endorsement from Shell, whose CEO explains in a video how the petrochemical giant did its first product derivative trade on blockchain “together with our partner Applied Blockchain”.

CEO and Chief Architect Adi Ben-Ari says he studied AI in university 20 years ago, working with basic principles that he says have only taken hold in industry in the past five years. So he’s reconciled to the idea that new technologies often take time to bed in. But he’s convinced that blockchain adoption is unstoppable because of the efficiencies it offers:

For all its strengths, Adi admits that blockchain is “not an easy technology to implement” – because it’s a “group technology”, with efficiencies that depend on shared use between different parties, such as customers and suppliers, as well having as regulatory issues to reconcile.

But Applied Blockchain is already working in a wide range of different areas, including an interesting project to help the UN distribute, which has already dealt with 100,000 refugees. The recipients don’t need any technology or money. Blockchain is used to cut transaction costs and ensure the aid reaches the right people:

Adi sees the future opportunity for his business in moving from creating efficiencies in a single business, to blockchain systems that are used between different parties. The aim is for all aspects of any single component or event to be brought together on a blockchain, instead of – as now – different aspects, such as price, delivery and technical specifications being saved in different systems:

The scope of Applied Blockchain’s work was captured in Adi’s talk to the London Blockchain Week 2019, which was titled Ships, Planes, Cars and Energy – all sectors in which the company is working.