CoinDesk Previews New 'State of Blockchain' at Consensus 2017

This article features the slides shown during Consensus 2017's opening remarks on the 'State of Blockchain'.

CoinDesk Research authors a quarterly industry overview report that summarizes key trends, data and events in the public and enterprise blockchain sectors.

The full 'Q1 2017 State of Blockchain' report, which expands on much of the material presented below, will be published shortly after Consensus.

CoinDesk

It's been an eventful 2017 so far in the blockchain space.

Public protocols have gained over $40bn in market cap, enterprise consortia have formed and flourished, and the push towards interoperability can be seen across the ecosystem.

Regulation has shifted the composition of global trading volume, the usage of the industry's own investment structure continues to gain steam, and the amount and quality of traditional financial and technology giants getting involved in blockchain has never been higher.

CoinDesk Research also recently tapped into the community to gain more intimate insights into the perception and sentiment around bitcoin and ethereum and garnered north of 1,100 responses.

Below, we highlight some of the largest takeaways from the presentation:

• Bitcoin averaged 287,000 transactions per day at fees averaging $0.62 each, leading 67% of the surveyed community to say they feel 'bad' about the current state of transaction fees and confirmation times
• More people now view bitcoin as a 'digital gold' than a 'digital currency' and 86% of the community believes ethereum can be used just as well as a medium exchange or payment method
• 47% believe we will see a contentious hard fork of bitcoin, and rather than preferring SegWit or a block-size increase, more individuals believe some combination of solutions is the best short-term scaling solution
• The majority of the community believes we will see the Lightning Network live on bitcoin, and both Raiden and proof-of-stake live on ethereum in 2018
• The overall state of bitcoin is nearly exactly split between positive and negative responses, while less than 5% of people responded negatively to the current state of ethereum
• Despite Hyperledger's multiple open-source frameworks, live proof of concepts, 130 plus member list and backing by the Linux Foundation, 87% of people have slight to no knowledge of the group
• Enterprise Ethereum Alliance launching in February was seen as the primary price driver of ether in Q1

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