‘No Space for More than 4 Blockchain Standards Until 2022’

Research firm Gartner says that interoperability issues and other factors may hinder financial companies hoping to deploy blockchain solutions over the next three to five years – meaning that only well-established public blockchain platforms or enterprise solutions stand a chance of cornering the market until at least 2022.

Per an official release, Fabio Chesini, Gartner’s senior research director, stated,

“Bank chief information officers must be mindful of the nascent and fragmented state of blockchain standards. We expect no more than four standards to lead the market in the next three to five years.”

Gartner says that most banks currently have to make a polarized choice: go with “enterprise-grade approaches like Corda, Hyperledger and Digital Asset, or choose from “many public blockchain standards like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, EOS and Tezos.”

And Chesini added,

“Blockchain standards for financial services companies are currently fragmented and immature. We are three to five years until standards mature and settle.”

The research company identified a number of reasons for its reasoning, including:

• Governance – legal issues still abound in the fintech world, and regulators keep moving the blockchain goalposts in many countries. And Gartner says that governance matters will not get much easier in the immediate future. In fact, the research company says governance “will remain centralized and hierarchical during the next three to five years.”
• Integration issues – software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers are not currently offering blockchain add-ons. Finding a way to get blockchain solutions working in sync with enterprise software will prove both challenging and expensive – and Gartner says software add-ons are still three to four years off.
• Interoperability – inter-company blockchain cooperation will be tough considering how many different standards companies can choose from. “Blockchains are a moving target,” says Gartner. And Chesini says that “cross-industry interoperability standards are, and will be, critical.” Again, however, Gartner believes that problem-solving interoperability solutions “are still three to five years away.”