Blockchain Market Could Reach $7 Billion Estimates Bank of America, Microsoft and Amazon to Remain At the Forefront

04. Oct 2018 Posted by Akolkar B on News

On Tuesday, October 2nd, CNBC published a report citing estimates made by Bank of America showing that the blockchain market can reach to $7 billion. Bank of America further estimates that tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon will remain at the forefront of this multi-billion-dollar opportunity.

Considering that the blockchain is still at a novice stage of development, and the blockchain adoption being slow so far, BoA has not put any specific deadline for its estimates. Bank of America research analyst Kash Rangan believes that the blockchain technology could easily blend with the existing cloud computing solutions to improve the supply-chain operations.

"Amazon will benefit from incremental cloud services demand from Blockchain implementation, while improved supply chain tracking should make Amazon's retail operations more efficient," Rangan said in a note to clients Tuesday. He further estimated that nearly 2% servers will be used to run blockchain i.e.  at $5,500 per server, per year.

There is no doubt to it that Amazon is aggressively working on new blockchain solution without making much noise. Earlier this year in April 2018, Amazon made headlines for introducing blockchain templates for Ethereum and Hyperledger. The newly launched Blockchain templates by Amazon Web Services will make is absolutely easy for users to build their own blockchain networks very quickly.

Additionally, the e-commerce giant has also partnered with Consensys, an Ethereum (ETH) design studio to develop and deploy enterprise blockchain solutions.

On the other hand, tech giant Microsoft can merge its Azure cloud services with blockchain to provide “Blockchain as a Service” (BaaS) solutions. “BaaS on Azure offers services such as smart contracts and other third-party apps, and should benefit as use of blockchain on Azure increases,” Rangan noted.

In its report, Bank of America notes down nine firms who could benefit a lot from blockchain technology. It includes Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, VMware, and real estate and mortgage firms Redfin, Zillow, and LendingTree.

Bank of America itself hold different patents in the blockchain space. Although blockchain is sure to have a big future in the American corporate industry, the banking giant notes that it is not clear how large it could be. “Many blockchain use cases have been identified, but full products/services have not yet been built out and are not used in production,” explains Bank of American in its report.