Industrial Blockchain: what’s next?

From my perspective, Blockchain, or let me call it “distributed ledger” has the potential to change the world to an extend that some of us already experienced in the ramp-up of internet performance. Some doubts about the performance and the bandwidth of networked systems have been clearly destroyed. Not so many enthusiasts have had the vision that video streaming and Internet TV would become obvious things of today’s life. The infrastructure which enabled this deployment also is a key success factor in the distributed ledger technology. Today we are still facing some bandwidth challenges due to the distribution of the blockchain but we also see emerging technological architectural approaches to further improve the computing power and bandwidth. This in return will enable an entirely new generation of applications. First use cases in different industries (Logistics, mobility, infrastructure, etc.) are already visible in the startup scene and will further expand from my perspective.

Since we are set to search for future business activities for TRUMPF we observe the startup scene and try to detect early trends which have the potential to change business massively. Therefore, we do not only look in our today’s core but also adjacent business fields. We try to find opportunities where we can provide value for the startups we invest in based on technologies, market access and operative excellence. Distributed ledger might be such a field to change the world massively and we can potentially provide technologies which solve bandwidth bottlenecks in hardware and architectural knowledge how to develop those future high speed networked systems. We are prepared to elaborate proof of concept studies together with innovative companies and help to industrialize such products. Such freedom to balance internal and external innovation by supporting startups is part of the innovation strategy where we can contribute as TRUMPF Venture.

We will face further expansion of applications for low transaction rates first and then see bandwidth improvement in computing power of networked systems. Based on these innovations we will discover a massive change in interlinked machine controlled global trade. The financing community might notice that the current Initial Coin Offering (ICO) with many different crypto currencies will decrease and step back to equity financing first until a proof of concept is shown and in a later stage make use of an ICO to scale the business.