If Microsoft Azure’s CTO is right, R3CEV may have just been the beginning. Mark Russinovich envisions a world where every industry is involved in a blockchain consortium. In fact, since the network effect of a blockchain is only amplified by the number of participants, he thinks this future will prove inevitable as companies seek efficiency in numbers. And there’s evidence so far to suggest that Russinovich is right. Since blockchain industry groups first began to pop up last year with the formation of financial consortium R3CEV , the rate those efforts being announced has only increased . To meet the growing demand, Microsoft went so far as to launch Project Bletchley , an effort designed to make it easier to establish consortia. Whereas Microsoft’s Blockchain-as-a-Service ( BaaS ) suite of tools will remain open to all protocols, consensus algorithms and databases, Bletchley was built from the ground up to help companies in the same industry take advantage of their similarities, even while they compete against each other. Instead of wondering where the next consortium might emerge, Russinovich argues we need look no further than the existing consortia seeing to the needs of various industries. Where they exist, he said, intermediaries exist, just waiting to be made more efficient by blockchain or cut out of the picture entirely. Russinovich said of financial firms so far interested in the idea: "If they’re going to get disrupted, they want to do it to themselves and then take advantage of the disruption." Disrupting consortia Typically, a consortium is owned and operated by competitors within an industry as a way to create shared standards, unify supply chains and self-regulate so as to return profits to the industry as a whole, according to the Ecommerce Digest definition . Examples that demonstrate the diversity of such […]
