Enterprise blockchain investment continues to grow beyond BFS

The enterprise blockchain market has grown exponentially in recent years. The number of in-production blockchain engagements grew by 138% in 2021 when compared to the year before. Historically, the banking and financial services (BFS) industry led blockchain investment. But in the 2021 iteration of our enterprise blockchain services market analysis, we saw impressive growth beyond BFS. The latest HFS Pulse survey results support this blockchain broadening. We asked executives from Global 2000 enterprises to rank the top three technologies they expect to invest the most in over the next 12-18 months—and found seven industries more blockchain minded than BFS. What exactly does that mean for enterprise leaders? The time to explore blockchain is now.

• The energy and utilities sectors are by some margin the leaders for blockchain investment today, contributing 15.5% of the executives ranking blockchain in their top three investments. The other leading industries were travel and hospitality, healthcare, and telecommunications.
• Only 6.4% of executives from BFS firms ranked blockchain as a top three investment priority, despite growth in use cases like payments, securities, and the entire decentralized finance ecosystem.
• HFS believes that BFS firms’ early investments, which they are yet to fully realize the benefit from, could be a key reason the industry appears lower down the list of investors, as they wait to yield the full benefit of existing projects before further investments.
• Also noteworthy is the global macroeconomic environment, which is placing increasing pressure on global banks to focus investments on perceived quick wins, while blockchain is often considered in the long-term high-risk investment bucket.
• Regardless of the reason for BFS’ slowdown in blockchain investment, the growing spending from other industries is promising for the technology. It proves that every enterprise, regardless of their industry, should be considering blockchain.

The Bottom Line: Enterprise blockchain continues to grow beyond banking and financial services – it’s here to stay – which means the time to explore is now.

Enterprise blockchain’s continued growth beyond BFS demonstrates the wider adoption of the technology across every industry. Exciting new use cases like peer-to-peer energy trading and the tokenization of renewable energy certificates in the energy and utilities sector are driving blockchain’s growth across industries. All of this means if you’re not already exploring the opportunities for the technology within your organization, given your peers already are, it’s something you must consider – even if you don’t make significant investments.

Explore the HFS Pulse Dashboard

Take a look at the breadth of data in our Pulse Dashboard, which showcases data about current and future demand trends for technology and business services and related emerging technologies. See more here.