By Michael Fay, Akamai Technologies, LLC
Blockchain has quickly become a disruptive technology enabling whole new business models and ecosystems including the rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. It is changing how people think about recording interactions, transparency and auditability.
Applications can extend beyond just providing an auditable ledger for tracking payments, financial services transactions, digital assets and currency balances. Blockchain can be leveraged for proof of existence and proof of integrity for data and/or state and establish provenance via an auditable trail of interactions. This could be applied to many industries ranging from insurance, advertising, health care, shipping and logistics, commerce and defense.
However, many popular blockchain implementations have real challenges and limitations around scalability, performance, reliability and security. A new blockchain architecture is required to address enterprise and institutional use cases that need scale and speed.