What’s Stopping Fortune 500 Companies from Adopting Blockchain?

Fortune 500 companies have been slow on the draw to adopt the blockchain. While exact figures elude us, it's been reported than only 3% are currently using this technology that's widely reported to be revolutionary and expected to infiltrate all aspects of business. So what's stopping them? Here's a list of a few of the reasons:


1. Immature Tech: The biggest problem large companies are facing with incorporating blockchain technology is the immaturity of the technology. Blockchain tech is developing and improving faster than any technology in history. Big companies generally move fairly slowly, and if they were to put resources into a blockchain solution now, it would likely be obsolete or uncompetitive by the time it was done. So most are waiting.


2. Blockchains are user-UNfriendly: Anyone who has dabbled in cryptocurrencies will have experienced a nightmare of difficulties. Existing tech companies are highly focused on deliver a great user experience and so far no cryptocurrency has delivered one. It's for this reason that companies such as The Divi Project and Nimiq are building next-generation cryptocurrencies with "Ease of Use" in mind. These newer technologies, designed with ordinary users in mind, will also appeal to big retailers who want to join the blockchain revolution but won't touch Bitcoin with a ten-foot-pole because it's too complicated.


3. Scalability: Most well-known blockchains don't yet scale to the speed and number of users that Fortune 500 companies require. For example, Bitcoin only processes 7 transactions per second, while PayPal does 250+ and Visa can do thousands as well. There are solutions coming such as "sharding" that will fix this to make blockchains work for millions of users.


4. Lack of Coders: Last year, $4 billion dollars poured into cryptocurrency ICOs alone, and they have swept up all the coding talent. Companies are having extreme difficulty hiring experts in blockchain for this reason, and also because the technology is so new, few people have much experience. Many companies are resorting to hiring coders experienced only with C++ or Javascript and having them learn "on the job." Furthermore, coders who do have blockchain experience are reporting that they can double their hourly rate.


While there's more than this to the story, these are the primary reasons. All of these challenges are being rapidly solved and we should expect to see more adoption of blockchains throughout the business world over the next several years, until this technology fades into the background and becomes part of normal, global operations.