Deloitte Outlines Five Major Obstacles to Blockchain’s Mainstream Adoption

“Big Four” audit and consulting firm Deloitte has outlined five basic areas of development for blockchain technology in order achieve widespread adoption, according to a study published September 28.

According to Deloitte, in order to be adopted by enterprises on a mass scale, blockchain technology should overcome five major obstacles – the possibility of time-consuming operations, lack of standardization, high costs and complexity blockchain applications, regulatory uncertainty, as well as the absence of collaboration between blockchain-related firms.

Identifying the area that needs the most development, Deloitte singled out the problem of possible operational delays on a distributed ledger network. The company emphasized that slow transaction speed is one of the main reasons for many players to avoid considering blockchain as a technology that can be applied in “large-scale applications.”

Another major obstacle for blockchain on the path to widespread adoption is lack of standardization. Deloitte pointed out that the lack of standardization prevents technology disruptors from interact with each other. The consulting giant cites the fact that there are over 6,500 active blockchain projects on GitHub, with most of them based on different protocols, consensuses, privacy measures, as well as written in different coding languages.

Among the remaining areas for development, Deloitte listed the necessity to reduce both costs and complexity of network operations, the importance of innovation-supporting regulation, as well as the crucial role of collaboration between blockchain-related firms.

In terms of costs and complexity of the emerging technology, Deloitte referred to major technology giants such as Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft that have reportedly delivered less complicated implementations of blockchain by using cloud technology, as well as contributed to improving the costs of operations on blockchain.

Among the most complex issues around blockchain regulation, the company highlighted the difficulty of regulating smart contracts, which do not necessarily fit into existing frameworks.

The report’s final point stresses the importance of cooperation between blockchain-related firms in order to push forward the new deployments of the technology, as well as to provide better education in the sphere. The company says the increasing number of blockchain consortia, such as R3, is a “bullish sign,” because the “value of a blockchain network increases with the number of users.”

Last month, Cointelegraph published an interview with Jeremy Gardner, founder of Blockchain Education Network and co-founder of blockchain prediction platform Augur. In the interview, the industry expert claimed that in order to achieve mass adoption, those developing in the industry must “include the people who have the most benefit” from blockchain technology – namely the world’s disenfranchised – commenting that “we haven’t done a great job doing that, yet.”