One of the largest tech conglomerates in the world, US-based Cisco, recently issued a report highlighting the company’s enterprise-oriented blockchain platform. In the report, Cisco suggested that blockchain has the potential to hold as much as 10 percent of the world’s GDP.  This means that several trillion dollars worth of value could be stored on both decentralized and permissioned blockchains by 2027.

While the crypto industry keeps experiencing ups and downs, with companies constantly at battle with the turbulent market, blockchain technology itself continues to advance. The industry has been on the rise since its inception in 2008 and is permeating into every niche imaginable—from supply chains to copyright management.

The most recent report published by Cisco has predicted a bright future for blockchain, saying the technology could very much become the norm for many industries within a couple of years.

Cisco has issued its report in order to highlight the company’s own blockchain platform focused on enterprises. According to the report, the main selling point for its solution is the technology’s potential.

Cisco identified transparency as one of the main problems enterprises face today, especially those in global supply chains. A rough estimate showed that US-based semiconductor companies lose over $7.5 billion each year due to counterfeiting.

Another major concern for suppliers is the sheer complexity of global trade. Multiple intermediaries, such as financial institutions and brokers, push suppliers in emerging markets to pay interest in receivable financing that is as high as 30 percent.

“Blockchain-based technologies can build a foundation for trust in the enterprise through the digitization of business processes, tokenization of assets, and codification of complex contracts,” Cisco’s report read.

The company believes that these technologies can enable business ecosystems, consisting of both internal and external partners, to securely interact and transact without human intervention and dramatically simplify operations for large enterprises.

Cisco cites a January report from IDC, which predicts the market for blockchain spending expanding to $9.7 billion per year by 2021. This is four times what was spent in 2018, which saw $2.1 billion go towards blockchain projects.

Such programmable commerce would open up more than $3 trillion in new business value, Cisco’s research found.

If the predictions made in the report were to come true, almost 10 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) would be stored on blockchain by 2027. This, however, doesn’t mean that the crypto industry would also see such a dramatic rise, as most enterprises and financial institutions would allegedly shift their focus to more interoperable blockchains.

Despite its original intention to support the existence of decentralized currencies, blockchain seems to have grown to many other applications. The technology’s ability to “automate trust,” as the Cisco report pointed out, has made it attractive to most companies in digital commerce.

As it effectively removes the need for an established third party such as a bank or an auditor to establish a trusted relationship, blockchain will begin to see more implementation in businesses of all sizes.

The report found that apart from creating cost-reducing solutions for businesses, blockchain could be used to optimize smart cities, supply chain solutions, and the internet of things (IoT). The company said that it was actively working with a number of ecosystem partners in order to develop “standards and tools for blockchain technology to reach its full potential in the enterprise.”

Cisco highlighted its work with the Trusted IoT alliance, Hyperledger project, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. The company also said that it was an Executive Committee member of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, where it was spearheading efforts to promote the acceptance of digital assets and blockchain-based technologies.

And while some skeptics might call Cisco’s projections for the future of blockchain very optimistic, this is not the first time a major industry player has made such assumptions. Back in 2017, Deloitte made similar predictions. The same year, the World Economic Forum predicted that blockchain technology would underpin 10 percent of global GDP by 2025, two years faster than Cisco’s prediction.

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