Unblocked

Chapter 1. KINDLING, MEET MATCH

Our world is now 30 years into its internet-driven, digital-centric life. This has changed us. It’s reshaped how we do the business of life—running a household or working a job. It’s dominated our leisure time. Altered our patterns of communication. Given us new ways to influence. Changed the architecture of our expectations—what we expect a friend, partner, colleague, or a business to be capable of.

It has also given us unprecedented capability. Inspired by the higher bar set by disruptive, digital-first players, we learned to demand more. We have a voice. And we can use it around the clock, through a spectrum of channels, to give rise to our collective influence. This power has shaped markets, as businesses clamored to respond to the new customer we have become. It has challenged established institutions, playing a role in evolving social norms, influencing geopolitical dialogue, and even toppling dictators. And it has moved us, since the dawn of the web, to a steadily escalating desire for more accountability, transparency, participation, inclusion, and openness.

But there is a dark underbelly to our digital transformation, and now, 30 years in, we are waking to a growing awareness of the implications of what we have created. Many people are realizing that the way the internet was built is costing us dearly. Power has become concentrated in the hands of a few internet giants, who now wield undue influence. Our digital lives generate heaps of data that propagate beyond our intent and control. It’s poorly protected by the companies on whose servers it sits, and time and time again these organizations demonstrate they are poor stewards. Malicious actors have found they can leverage our inability to distinguish real from fake in the digital world, to doctor our perception of reality with ease.

This awakening is happening amid a backdrop of global discontent. We’re witnessing a backlash over economic inequality, plummeting trust in institutions to protect citizens and consumers, widening political divides, escalating knowledge of discrimination and exploitation, and anger over the reach of state surveillance. Like dry kindling, this discontent holds enormous potential energy—energy that, with the right catalyst, could ignite fast and spark broad, disruptive change.

In this moment of amassing restlessness and discontent, we’re entering the dawn of the blockchain era. One by one, this new technology has promised a solution to each concern of our digitally driven lives: lack of transparency, accountability, verifiable identity, control of data, and security. The technology’s driving force, decentralization, has allowed its architects to envision an opportunity to topple institutional centers of power and address deep inequities—and to create a new era of entrepreneurism. They have envisioned moving anything of value securely and directly—as simply as handing a piece of paper currency to someone on the street—without a corporation or government sitting in the middle. And they can envision flexing it to attack unique challenges in every industry: energy, media, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, agriculture, real estate, education, health care, transportation, and so on—even aspects of government.

This rising discontent is the kindling. In blockchains we’ve found the match.

Blockchains and the decentralization movement have now captured the hearts and minds and imaginations of an entire population of pioneers. They are many tens of thousands strong, hailing from well over 100 countries around the globe to join this movement. Among them you will find some of the best minds from lauded corporations, top academic institutions, think tanks, and government—not to mention plenty of burgeoning startups and scattered solo operators who’ve mastered the technology and are already building things we couldn’t have dreamed of a mere decade ago. They seek no less than to remake the foundational systems that drive our world. They are forging an ethos to transform our digital lives with transparency, trust, and accountability that permeates walls, borders, and tribes.

The loudest battle cry may be to scatter and decentralize today’s centers of power. But there is a twist that works symbiotically to foster blockchain investment from those very centers of power: it also holds the promise of making large organizations dramatically more efficient. From supply chain to finance, from marketing to operations, divisions across the corporation could find significant new efficiencies and cost savings from more mature blockchain solutions.

Bridget van Kralingen, IBM’s Senior Vice President of Global Industries, Platforms and Blockchain, explains it this way: “Enterprises are not just experimenting with blockchains, but actually moving into production and scale with blockchains. It is early days of the technology in enterprises, but there are some very promising signs in terms of its uses and applications . . . We are seeing this move at a really fast pace toward industrial-strength.”⁶ International Data Corporation forecasts worldwide spending on blockchains to reach $11.7 billion in 2022.⁷ Hundreds of the world’s largest companies have joined consortia to collaborate on, learn, and experiment together. Deloitte’s 2018 survey of more than 1,000 “blockchain-savvy” executives around the globe found that 74% of executive teams believe there is a compelling business case for use of blockchain technology and 84% believe it will eventually achieve mainstream adoption. Enterprises are clearly starting to realize that blockchains hold the potential to become an automated, secure backbone for payments and for contracts that could eradicate the paper and inefficiencies that still plague corporate ecosystems. The Deloitte survey concluded that “the only real mistake we believe organizations can make regarding blockchain right now is to do nothing.”⁸

According to Deloitte, the only true mistake organizations can make regarding blockchains is to do nothing.

The early pioneers are working to take the movement to the next step—and they are actively recruiting an array of gifted minds from a variety of disciplines to join their ranks. While to date the movement has been driven by and focused primarily on technologists, Chris Dixon, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has said that we need “to grow the army. We need 10 million people—programmers and researchers and entrepreneurs and product designers and creative people.”⁹ With this next wave of diverse skill sets, the movement will gain even more power.

This growing army of brilliant minds is rapidly working through the many hurdles the still-raw technology presents. But even here in its early adolescence, and even if blockchain technology as we know it today is still a work in progress, the decentralization revolution has already begun. Our world has already forever changed.

European Parliament member and chair of the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) panel Eva Kaili said, “Once I understood it, I saw the possibilities of the technology in basically everything. It removes friction and intermediation anywhere this is a problem. You cannot stop it. You have to understand it, and find a way to work with it.”¹⁰ Twenty-eight-year-old Steven McKie, a writer, developer, and founding partner at investment fund Amentum, says, “Some say blockchains are like a religion, others just an impassioned pursuit. But the younger crowd sees a platform for expanded freedoms they never imagined possible. Many projects will fail, but this won’t be failure. The learnings will be reinvested in our ever-evolving education. We are learning how to build distributed, interoperable systems that change human incentives, and can increase global prosperity. Everything can be decentralized, and many of us believe the future of humanity depends on it. This is a battle for our future. And if you change the rules, change the tools, change the culture, you can change society.”¹¹

A decentralized future may just draw from technology that is yet to be developed. Interest in blockchains has unleashed a flood of exploration in other kinds of technology that also supports decentralization.And the movement will broaden to bring in other disruptive technologies to assist; artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) are three key technologies that already play a big role. Blockchains have and will continue to stoke renewed interest and advancements in cryptography, which in turn could catalyze new innovation. But whatever the ultimate technical answer, we know already that blockchains are a social movement as much as they are a technology. They offer hope in a way our world is craving.

Vitalik Buterin, who proposed Ethereum—one of the top projects in blockchain history—before he was even 21 years old, speaks to how this movement goes far beyond technology. “What we are talking about here,” Vitalik writes, “has more to do with reforming underlying patterns of behavior, and especially the incentives, monetary, social, and otherwise, that drive how we interact.”¹²

This movement has stoked the passion of a growing contingent of blockchain enthusiasts—developers, policymakers, activists, investors—that, finally, can taste a better future, and can see a path in which they can contribute to building that future. They are motivated by the financial or societal returns of doing so, and often both. And they have gathered fuel in the form of staggering amounts of capital. “Now, whether right or wrong,” says Diana Biggs, Head of Digital Innovation for HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management in the UK and Europe, “the financial incentives with blockchains have generated massive interest in the space, and that has brought more momentum to the movement and its focus on digital identity, financial inclusion, transparency, open source, and collaborative systems.”¹³

Blockchain pioneers are aided by a technology that is inherently resistant to being constrained. Key ingredients are being baked into blockchains that serve to accelerate social change—decentralization and built-in incentive structures that, at the right moment, are poised to activate and engage communities en masse. Ready or not, like it or not, we are on the brink of a global conflagration that, once it catches fire, has the potential to proliferate at hyper-speed.

We can’t put out the fire—nor, as you’ll see, do we want to—but we do need to learn about it now, and actively feed and tend it in such a way that it lives up to its promise to make our world better.

“Nobody knows how this technology will be used,” Maja Vujinovic observes. “We need to keep testing and learning, we need to keep rolling up our sleeves and pushing for pilots—and we need to be very conscious about what we want this technology to do when it reaches maturity.” When people come together to use it for good, she points out, blockchain technology has the potential to propel us leagues forward. “We can’t implement blockchains or any other technology and expect it to solve mass societal ills like poverty or expect it to save the world,” she says. “It doesn’t work that way. But we can do that. We can. If consciousness is present in the design, we can use the technology to advance our world.”¹⁴