Bank of America estimates that once blockchain is fully adopted it will become a multi-billion dollar opportunity for tech firms such as Amazon and Microsoft.

“Amazon will benefit from incremental cloud services demand from blockchain implementation,” says Bank of America research analyst Kash Rangan. The e-commerce giant will also internally benefit from the open ledger technology making its supply chain tracking and operations, in general, more efficient.

Rangan explains that the estimates are based on the assumption that 2% of servers will be utilised to operate the blockchain at $5,500 per server, per year.

A revolutionary way

He adds that blockchain shares data on a distributed, secure, and unalterable ledger in a way that “databases have not been able to in the past”.

The technology has the potential to improve existing areas of Software-as-a-Service or SaaS, says Rangan. Microsoft’s Azure, for example, could rely on blockchain-as-a-service or BaaS, on its popular cloud computing platform.

“BaaS on Azure offers services such as smart contracts and other third-party apps, and should benefit as the use of blockchain on Azure increases,” Rangan states.

Oracle, IBM, Salesforce.com, Vmware as well as Redfin, Zill and Lending Tree could also potentially benefit significantly from blockchain adoption. “Many blockchain use cases have been identified, but full products and services have not yet been built out and are not used in production,” Rangan concludes.