Excelian, an award-winning tech consulting firm operated by multi-bln dollar software development company Luxoft, recently released its 2016 tech report entitled “Big Data: Technology Special,” featuring the most important and disruptive technologies such as Fintech and Blockchain.

Blockchain is in the investigative phase

On a section entitled “Three Techs to Track,” the company listed three emerging technologies for businesses to understand and analyze. One of the three technologies was Blockchain, which the Excelian research team described as “the biggest tsunami of 2016.”

The research paper emphasized the pace of the development of Blockchain, stating that the Blockchain development community is extremely active in the United States. A part of the section reads:

“They say there’s a Blockchain conference in the US every day. It’s therefore no surprise that early innovators are scrambling, Fintech is all the rage and incumbents are joining the R3 consortium to embrace the threat rather than risking disruption from new players. It’s a two-pronged hype cycle that we haven’t seen in a very long time, being industry-led just as much as it is technology led.”

Trapped between regulatory conflicts and serious security compromisations

In spite of the enthusiasm of businesses, banks and financial institutions towards Blockchain, Excelian believes the technology is still in its investigative phase. The research team allocated a large number of technologies that have shown significant support from businesses and investors in 2016 in four different categories: hold, investigate, trial and adopt.

Specifically, the team laid out several examples of Blockchain platforms and startups including Ethereum, R3 and Corda, all of which secured multi-mln dollar funding rounds in the past. However, Blockchain fell under the investigative phase in the research of Excelian, while platforms like Google cloud and Azure were listed in the trial phase.

For the most part, the categorization of Blockchain under the investigative phase is accurate, primarily because banks, businesses and financial institutions haven’t found a way to integrate the technology into existing systems. At the moment, they are trapped between regulatory conflicts and serious security compromisations.

A complex but promising technology

Still, the firm recognizes the potential of Blockchain and is quite optimistic about the fact that the financial sector is allocating billions of dollars in trying to integrate Blockchain as the next generation technology.

The paper read, “It’s quite remarkable that a technology invented to disrupt banking and money management as we know it, have been embraced by the financial services sector and, to a certain degree, the financial regulators – the very same people that they were supposed to displace. In fact, the successive waves of interest described above were actually driven by the business leaders, a rare phenomenon for such a complex emerging technology.”