Usually, changes in social trends, industries, consumer habits and even legal provisions can be understood by simply “following the money”. But what if there was something else that we could track to understand a whole range of operations and services, services like the property register, the shared use of goods or services, cloud storage, digital IDs, public services or even music? Such a thing would doubtlessly be incredibly powerful and attract great interest. That “something else” is blockchain, and although it was originally conceived to serve bitcoin, it is reaching increasingly more areas of our day-to-day lives, even if we are not aware of it.

  This can be seen in the fact that some 80% of the 100 largest companies on the planet currently use blockchain and in many cases use more than one blockchain technology. The specialist firm Blockdata recently published the results of a report analysing the use of distributed ledger technologies amongst the 100 largest corporations. The study goes back to 2014 when a good number of those companies first announced their commitment to joining consortiums, building their own accounting networks or using blockchain-based solutions.  

Since then, 81 of those companies have opted to use these technologies in their projects, and there is a clear preference for two in particular. First, there is Hyperledger, an open-source modular blockchain project started by the Linux Foundation and the de facto standard for business blockchain platforms. Then, there is Ethereum, a decentralised open-source platform for creating and executing smart contracts and whose infrastructure allows anyone to create decentralised applications (DApps).  

Here at GDS Modellica, we have taken some of the most interesting points revealed in this study and compiled them, as always, in an infographic. In this simple, colourful and intuitive document, you can easily see the impact blockchain is having on our lives. In fact, many of these top 100 businesses are companies that most of us deal with on a regular basis, including Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Toyota, VISA and two of the key names during the pandemic, Pfizer and Moderna.