Think 2017 was a fluke? Not according to blockchain advisor Oliver Bussmann who makes the case next year will see further growth.

Oliver Bussmann is founder and managing partner at Bussmann Advisory, the president of not-for-profit Crypto Valley Association and former group CIO and managing director at UBS.

“2017 was a year of tremendous growth for blockchain, though not in the expected ways.

At the beginning of this year, I and others predicted that 2017 would be the year that blockchain moved from proof-of-concepts into production. We did see some notable successes in this regard.

Ripple became a fully operational platform with over 100 members and payment volumes in the billions, and industries began to form blockchain business networks, for example, the Digital Trade Chain consortium (DTC) in trade finance.”

Read the full article at Coindesk: 2018: Another Growth Year for Blockchain

The next-generation of financial technologists will want more from corporations and businesses, argues ex-CME digitization lead Sandra Ro.

Sandra Ro is managing partner and COO at startup UWINCorp and a former head of digitization for U.S. derivatives giant CME Group, where she spearheaded blockchain and cryptocurrency efforts.

“Today, there is already a growing movement of traditional financial executives leaving for opportunities in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector, but it’s a growing trend that is about much more than money.

Many people want a mission and purpose in life that aligns with their own ideals, and most corporations are simply divorced from any kind of true to mission to solve social problems or help communities in a meaningful way as a part of doing business.”

Read the full article at Coindesk: Blockchain Brain Drain Is About More Than Money

Bitcoin’s markets may be booming but it’s the network’s rare development talent that may be most valuable says Ariel Deschapell.

Ariel Deschapell is a full-stack javascript developer teaching at the Ironhack coding bootcamp, and a Henry Hazlitt fellow in Digital Development at the Foundation for Economic Education.

“For the fourth time, Scaling Bitcoin brought together academics, developers and entrepreneurs from across the blockchain ecosystem, many of whom have been in the thick of cryptocurrency ideas and development for years…

…one way or another all participants did agree on a single, much wider, and more fundamental concern for scaling this still nascent ecosystem: a drought of quality developer talent.”

Read the full article at Coindesk: Bitcoin’s Real Bottleneck

Decentralized public blockchains are the only way enterprises will commit to digitizing services in an interoperable manner, says EY’s Paul Brody.

Paul Brody is a principal and global innovation leader for blockchain technology at EY.

“Say what you will about Cryptokitties, but the app does something today that nearly all enterprise blockchains still cannot: exchange one item of value, a cryptokitty, for another item of value, ether.

That item of value may be silly (a digital kitten), but to those who care about them, it’s really enough.

More importantly, the entire contract and transaction, including the exchange of product, takes place on the ethereum blockchain. At EY, our hypothesis is that this kind of low-friction, closed-loop economic transaction is, in fact, the ultimate end game for most enterprise blockchain aspirations.”

Read the full article at Coindesk: Public Blockchains’ Lure Will Become Irresistible for Enterprises in 2018

2018 will be the year enterprise blockchain goes live and businesses can move from experimenting to production, says Oracle’s Mark Rakhmilevich.

Mark Rakhmilevich is Senior Director of Blockchain Product Management at Oracle. He’s working on Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service and guides enterprises, ISVs, and SIs in building blockchain applications and integrating enterprise systems with this platform.

“Talk to enterprise blockchain enthusiasts and they will tell you about the potential use cases in their industries and the proofs-of-concept they have run to prove blockchain value in the enterprise.

Ask them about production deployments… and they demur, pointing out implementation challenges and production-readiness gaps.

Will this change in 2018 and will we see a significant shift from experimentation to production deployments of enterprise blockchains?”

Read the full article at Coindesk: Enterprise Blockchain Is Ready to Go Live in 2018

What’s in store for blockchains in 2018? Infosys’s Peter Loop offers a diverse selection of forecasts for the year ahead.

Peter Loop is associate vice president and senior principal technology architect at Infosys, where he focuses on delivering enterprise cryptocurrency and blockchain ledger technologies, API management and cloud migration of enterprise systems.

“During the course of 2017, we saw big technology players making moves in blockchain.

In addition to Microsoft and IBM, Oracle announced in October a new cloud-based blockchain-as-a-service offering, while SAP opened up early access to its own version of the offering in May. With these updates, and others, it’s safe to say that Fortune 500 companies are now pairing with providers to explore blockchain’s uses in their businesses

These are examples of the type of adoption and validity we expected to see in 2017, but even these positive developments can still be considered scratching the surface.”

Read the full article at Coindesk: 5 Blockchain Developments Coming in 2018