Microsoft Blockchain Chief: Adoption Is Past the Tipping Point
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Blockchain technology has already overcome the largest hurdles to mainstream adoption, according to a representative of Microsoft’s blockchain division. Yorke Rhodes, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Blockchain, highlighted that the technology had already jumped its largest technological hurdles.
“I really think that we are there in terms of getting beyond what we need to get there,” Rhodes said.
Speaking to an audience at the Ethereal Summit in Brooklyn, Rhodes compared the current state of blockchain technology to that of the Internet in 1995. “Enterprises didn’t know what they could do on the web,” Rhodes said, “and for consumers there wasn’t enough content that they wanted.”
However, with the introduction of user-friendly tools and interfaces, Rhodes said, the infrastructure was created for enterprise building, and user content to begin experiencing a snowball effect as traditional businesses began to recognize the importance of growing their online presence.
In the same way, forward-thinking tech companies have already begin incorporating blockchain or “Web 3.0” payments into their standard products. Rhodes pointed to the Samsung S10 and Opera Browser as new ways to onboard consumers “relatively painlessly.”
“We’re really trying to help enterprises cross this chasm,” Rhodes said, suggesting that the increased involvement of companies like JPMorgan, Microsoft and Ernst & Young is an indicator that the largest barriers to enterprise adoption have been overcome.
“Companies like Ernst & Young and Microsoft are both fundamentally large conservative organizations,” Rhodes added. “So the fact that they’re both embracing this amorphous concept of decentralization is quite important as a tipping point.”
As a case in point, Rhodes noted Microsoft’s latest announcements in enterprise blockchain solutions—such as a recently-announced partnership with Starbucks to track bean provenance, a reboot of JPMorgan’s Quorum, or the company’s participation in the Ethereal Virtual Hackathon.
In collaboration with Gitcoin, the company offered nineteen bounties to Ethereum developers, eighteen of which have been successfully claimed.
“If you’ll look closely, you can see the ‘Microsoft’ logo right next to the words “2500 DAI,” he noted. “We want developers to look at that and say, ‘What’s Dai?’ What’s that about?”
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