The blockchain industry has been growing steadily in 2018, despite the market downtrend. The “State of Blockchain Q2 2018” report form CoinDesk shows that big corporate players are starting to catch the adoption wind of this emerging tech.
Santander launched a foreign exchange service based on Ripple’s xCurrent messaging platform. R3’s Corda was chosen by 3 major insurance consortiums while HSBC unveiled the first commercial-ready trade finance product.
J.P. Morgan used their Quorum to test a $150 million debt issuance that caused Quorum to gain adoption outside of J.P. Morgan. More on the tech side of the market, IBM trialed live transactions using we.trade, a trade finance consortium, and also tested their first token on the Stellar platform.
American Express rolled out a new rewards system using Hyperledger blockchain. ConsenSys unveiled Kaledio, a blockchain-based cloud that will be trialed by several Filipino banks. Microsoft launched Azure Blockchain Workbench, a tool to simplify dapp development.
Oracle touts its cloud-based blockchain services as part of its SaaS offering. Amazon WS announced a protocol agnostic blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) product and partnered with ConsenSys to offer enterprise blockchain services.
Facebook’s head of Messenger leaves his position to gather a small group that will explore how to best use blockchain within Facebook. Baidu launched an image rights management platform using an unknown blockchain platform.
These corporations and many more are now very serious about blockchain tech. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, it seems that most people and companies have taken a giant step back however, the underlying technology in the face of blockchain seems to be doing very well on its own.