The year 2020 was widely heralded as the great year of leap in terms of technological adoption and digital transformation. The story goes that technology experts heralded the 2020s decade as the “Second Roaring Twenties” where technology will be aptly amplified as industrial catalysts towards the fourth industrial revolution. With all the predictions and promises, the year 2020 was the first crucial step, the precipice for the great economic prosperity of the decade with technologies like Blockchain leading the charge towards unprecedented process efficiency.

Instead, the year 2020 was stuttered not by the great technology disruption, but the great distress caused by the global pandemic that caught the world unaware and largely unprepared. What was supposed to be a year of steam for the technological maturity of Blockchain’s nascent status, was instead became a year of pivot. Just as Blockchain gave us the outlook to reimagine processes, the pandemic has given us the outlook in re-assessing the fundamentality of technology as catalyst in the humanisation effect of alleviating human suffering.

As we look towards the end of 2020 and towards the 2021 where the World Economic Forum suggests it as a “Great Reset”, the Blockchain industry, too, will not only pivot and reset, but also hope to regain its great momentum to its societal and industrial maturity.

Forrester released a research and prediction whitepaper entitled: 2021 critical business and technology trends. It includes the state of Blockchain.

• Globally, 30% of projects will make it into production. Despite the disruption, Blockchain development and adoption will persist and will strive to gain its momentum basing on diverse use cases. Blockchain consortium research and mass market utilization will continue as the technology will inter-connect markets and micro-services for any business and financial service.

• Permissioned blockchains will remain the order of the day. Enterprise Blockchain will reassess the concept of permissioned and permissionless and their long-term viability and mutual benefits to each participating network. Questions such as deviation, policy-making and market chain-reactions ie DeFi and other cryptographic assets served as a fork where decision makers and enterprise leaders will surely re-assess network participation out of the market where on-a-heartbeat partnerships will surely be tested as the years and business go ahead.

• China, the Blockchain Dragon. Of all countries, you have China who have opted all-in to the Blockchain technology where it is a factor in their architecture of city and society. IT & STEM hubs across China’s provinces are also rising in terms of technological research and the accessibility of the technology is attainable to students where the country hopes it accelerates the scalability of its application across industry verticals where breakthroughs in the form of market scalability diversifies the country’s portfolio on embedded technologies that are co-opting the fourth industrial revolution.