Tim Draper: Crypto will have transformative effect on industries

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will become an $80 trillion business in the next 15 years, according to American venture capital investor Tim Draper.

“The internet started in the same way, it came in big waves and then it kind of came crashing down, and then the next wave comes concentrated but much bigger, and I suspect the same thing will go on here (with Bitcoin),” he said this week at the Deal Street Asia PE-VC Summit 2018 in Singapore.

Draper, founder of DFJ and the Draper Venture Network and early investor in Skype, Baidu, Tesla, TwitchTV, Hotmail, Cruise Automation, and Thumbtack, added: “I think it’s going to have such a transformative effect on industries that we never even imagined would be transformable. The internet went after industries that were $10-100 billion markets, cryptocurrency will go after trillion dollar markets – these are finance, healthcare and insurance, banking and investment banking, and governments.”

Moving on up

Earlier this week, Juniper Research released a study showing that 65% of large enterprises with over 10,000 employees are considering or actively engaged in blockchain deployments. This marks a significant rise from research carried out last year, when the corresponding figure was 54%.

Nearly a quarter of companies considering deploying blockchain had moved beyond proof of concept into trials and commercial roll-outs, with dramatic diversification in use cases over the past year. Only 15% of proposed projects were now related to payments (compared with 34% last year), with significant interest in opportunities across diverse fields including logistics, authentication and smart contracts.

The findings tally with a previous Juniper Research report which identified savings and cost reductions across a range of verticals in areas such as compliance and fraud reduction, including more than $100 billion by 2030 in food exports.

Ethereum gaining traction

Nearly half of companies were considering using Ethereum as their blockchain, reflecting the fact that its token standardisation has enabled the creation of an ecosystem of dApps to be built on its chain.

Furthermore, all responding companies which had already invested over $100,000 in blockchain indicated they would be spending at least this amount again on the technology over the next 12 months. According to Juniper Research, this demonstrates that initial feedback has been largely positive in most cases, sufficiently so for companies to move to the next stage of integration.

Disruption expected

At the same time, however, around three quarters of respondents expect disruption to either internal systems or clients’ systems. Juniper Research’s James Moar comments: “The findings illustrate the need for companies to engage in a prolonged period of parallel running new systems alongside the old, to iron out any issues that might arise.”

IBM has cemented its position as the go-to company for deployment, with the tech giant ranked first by 65% of respondents. Microsoft was in second place with 7%.