“Companies are afraid of violating securities laws here in the US," Gombert said. "Law firms are giving faulty advice. Many crypto and blockchain companies are domiciling overseas in countries that are more crypto friendly.”
Another concern is that data regulations, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation—which requires that companies obtain explicit permission from individuals to utilize their data—could affect blockchain’s unalterable ledger, according to Manny Puentes, CEO of Rebel AI, an ad tech firm that uses blockchain to fight domain spoofing.
“If someone requests their data be removed from the system, the distributed nature of blockchain makes this challenging at best,” Puentes said.
And while blockchain can make transactions immutable, its application is limited since blockchain is not designed for platforms with millions of transactions per second, nor is it intended to store large amounts of data, according to Eric Piscini, CEO of blockchain startup Citizens Reserve.
Another issue limiting blockchain from broader adoption is that there are a lack of clear standards around how to best apply the emerging technology, according to Saleem Khan, global leader of data innovation at data analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet. Some tech companies have their own blockchain standards, but there is no consensus on what the industry-wide best practices should be, Khan said.
While crytopcurrencies such as bitcoin dominate the coverage devoted to blockchain, the technology has several other uses and can be applied to supply chains. Among Deloitte’s survey respondents, 53% said that their company is working on using blockchain within their supply chain.
From April-June 2017, Gartner surveyed 3,160 chief information officers worldwide and found that just 1% of respondents had adopted any type of blockchain technology, and only 8% planned to do so in the short term. In the Gartner hype cycle, blockchain sits just past “peak of inflated expectations” and is on the downward slope toward “trough of disillusionment.”
However, 43% of the senior executives worldwide polled in Deloitte’s study said that blockchain is in their company’s “top 5 strategic priorities” and 45% of respondents indicated that they will likely participate in a blockchain consortium.