As 20 billion connected devices come online in the next few years¹, The internet of things is poised to play an increasingly important role in our economy. IDC expects IOT based spending to top$1 trillion by 2020² representing a large swath of industries including agriculture, transportation, logistics & healthcare. These numbers however, fail to address the issues around standards, technology complexity, security & privacy that have hindered widespread adoption across many industries. Blockchain technology promises to address a number of these issues and industries today have started actively experimenting with use cases that bring these cutting-edge technologies together.

Research published by Cisco and the Boston Consulting Group shows that while only a small number of firms are currently experimenting with IOT and Blockchain, these early use cases prove that substantial advantages can be achieved in certain applications. These applications include areas in which:

• High trust and transparency is needed across devices managed by multiple parties
• Reliance by multiple stakeholders is required on a single version of truth 
• Device authenticity is critical to prevent the tampering of devices
• Autonomous decision making is needed in a decentralized fashion

The research looks at a number of industry use cases for blockchain and IOT across a spectrum of categories such as operations tracking, provenance, M2M communication, service-based business models and monetization of data. The analysis indicates that a small percentage of these use cases are ready for enterprise deployments, while a majority of use cases remain in the proof-of-concept stage.

Blockchain technology with IoT will ultimately drive significant value for the enterprise but most of today's blockchain applications in the IoT sector have yet to gain widespread adoption. As companies move from proofs of concept to large-scale enterprise deployments, they are looking for the right partner to help them succeed. Cisco is working to make blockchain enterprise-ready as businesses look to realize the promise of this transformative technology, Learn more about how Cisco is developing a comprehensive foundation for enterprises to build trust-based business networks on the blockchain.

Sources

1 -ZDNet

2 -IDC