Most people have become familiar with the emergence of Blockchain through the news of Bitcoin’s wild ride.  While Bitcoin’s future is still highly speculative, there is a need to differentiate between Bitcoin and Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin. A core benefit of Blockchain is the ability to maintain a secure and immutable ledger of information. It simply creates one version of the truth that is not alterable – pun intended. What’s so ironic about this is that many of today’s applications and transactions are built with extra layers of application logic or business processes to manufacture otherwise-nonexistent trust between transacting parties. That means extra complexity, higher cost, and involvement of intermediary parties not essential to the actual transaction in hand … while still not avoiding the need to audit and assure end-to-end the alleged trust.

Asserting trust early on and making it natively integral to transactions will eliminate many steps in the delivery process. The changes coming could be fundamental in how a new value proposition is conceived, created and delivered to its consumer and may be much different than how it works today. This will potentially resemble and significantly exceed  the way the Internet gave birth to search engines and the way mobile technology fueled social networks that joined forces to create the long tail economy that in turn invited big data into our lives. Blockchain will find a magnet in decentralized applications popping up in the cloud. The entire ecosystem as we know today for many industries is positioned to go through seismic changes.

We at eZuce are intrigued by this phenomenon and would rather not stay on the sidelines. We recently experimented with the concept which resulted in our press release with Emercoin (see: http://ezuce.com/ezuce-emercoin-speed-adoption-blockchain-phone-video-services/) where eZuce demonstrated Uniteme and sipXcom capabilities to dip into a blockchain secured ENUM database to resolve the called party’s IP address - thus bypassing unnecessary network translation and routing. We are now looking deeper into how to apply Blockchain to decentralized, cloud-based services. Certainly, interesting and fun times are coming.