Bitcoin Enterprise in 2020?

Bitcoin (BTC) is the most popular digital currency in the institutional trading world. Also, it is the best trading option available, both spot and derivatives, with a bright track record and the most extended history and availability of data. As a result, this made some of the most prominent financial services institutions highly interested. Then in 2019, it showed the birth of some bitcoin products like Bakkt’s physically delivered bitcoin futures. Also, the Fidelity Digital Assets bitcoin custody solution and TD Ameritrade’s trading offerings.

Now, some are wondering if this will also be the case for the large enterprises looking at blockchain as a technology. And these firms want to innovate using more manageable payments over fast and secure transaction networks and processes built around smart contracts. Can they utilize the bitcoin blockchain as a foundation and place their middleware stack and end-user decentralized Web 3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) application on top?

As of now, most of the enterprise-focused blockchain development has been done on permissioned and private blockchain protocols like Hyperledger Fabric and R3’s Cords. And this was mainly due to the fact that they give enough privacy, scalability, and transaction finality guarantees.

Compared to them, they hardly considered the improvement on top of the bitcoin blockchain until recently. This was in May when Microsoft revealed their permission-less, Decentralized Identifier (DID) network dubbed as ION. It runs exclusively on top of the bitcoin blockchain.

As a result, this triggered a change in the sentiment among developers and enterprises. They should think of bitcoin as a potential layer for enterprise blockchain development. For instance, companies such as Bitfury already had significant growth with enterprise-tailored blockchain offerings like blockchain as a service (BaaS) using bitcoin as a base player.

Enterprise-Ready Development Platform

Now, some facts indicate that bitcoin stacks up as an enterprise-ready development platform. Based on a recent Ernst & Young study, among decision-makers across the U.S., Europe, Asia, one of the reasons to consider blockchain, in general, is the preservation of data integrity. Here, bitcoin is the ideal winner as the most trusted and safest public blockchain. Currently, the bitcoin blockchain is secured by 97 quintillion hashes per second (EH/s).

For the maintainers of the bitcoin blockchain, data integrity is priority number one. And they are very definitive regarding any feature that might lead to security bugs and potentially compromise the integrity of the protocol.

In addition to that, simple blockchain explorers could easily observe and analyze the efficiency and consistency of the data. Also, they could use surveillance tools such as Elliptic, Elementus, and Chainalysis.