Opportunities for Blockchain in the Energy Sector

The premise that blockchain has the potential to redistribute markets and redefine the entire economy is one that is widely shared today. Over the past three years, more than 2,500 patents relating to this technology have been filed. In the first quarter of 2016 alone, more than $1 billion was invested in blockchain start-ups and the World Economic Forum even maintains that 10% of global GDP could be created on blockchain platforms in 2025. In the light of this huge, emerging trend, organizations are beginning to ask the question: Is blockchain a threat or an opportunity?

Blockchain is an information storage and transmission technology for data and transactions that uses a secure, distributed registry. Governance may be decentralized among peers. In blockchain, data is certified by certain members of the registry (the miners) and is verifiable by all others. If anyone wanted to corrupt this distributed consensus, it would be necessary to corrupt 51% of the servers on a public blockchain simultaneously—something that has never been done to date.