Despite regulatory hurdles, 2019 could be the year of 'blockchain' in India

Experts claim blockchain, along with other technologies such as cloud, AI and IoT, is powerful enough to disrupt several sector

Kamesh Mupparaju’s crypto currency exchange was all but uprooted when the Indian central bank announced a blanket ban on crypto trading in early 2018. His firm, Hyderabad-based BTCXIndia, was at the time, allowing trading in Bitcoin and Ethereum and had just signed up a new token called Ripple.

While Mupparaju, along with the entire bitcoin exchange community, made representations to the authorities, it was understood that crypto trading would not be allowed, at least in the foreseeable future.

Seeing the headwinds, Mupparaju cooked up a pivot. He wound up the exchange and started a blockchain consultancy S Chand Labs — “A production studio that helps companies unlock business value via blockchain based technology”, as he calls it.

Mupparaju is one of several technology entrepreneurs in India who, in the light of the crack-down on crypto currencies like bitcoin, have pivoted to service-based businesses around blockchain, the underlying technology of bitcoin or any other form of crypto currencies.

Blockchain is a new ledger system that allows information (transactions, logins, etc) to be stored in the form of a block (a piece of information) one over the other. Once initiated, it grows like a chain, and does not allow the information to be altered or removed later on. But the most impressive part of the system is that it is completely decentralised. That means, the ledger is not maintained by a single person or entity, but by a computer code running on computing power pooled in by all its users.

“While the authorities see the risks in the case of bitcoin, its underlying technology — blockchain — carries enormous potential and must not be immediately discarded,” said the chief executive of a now defunct crypto currency start-up, who did not wish to be identified.

From smaller start-up studios to large IT services firms like IBM, all are jumping onto the ‘blockchain’ bandwagon, pitching enterprises to adopt the new technology. According to Tracxn, a start-up tracker, as many as 51 new blockchain firms were incorporated in 2018. This is, understandably, lower from 110 setup in 2017. 

In fact, most of the industry and technology experts believe that if 2018 was seen as the year of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India, the period when the country saw AI moving out of the drawing board to see actual implementation in many a segments, 2019 is poised to become to year of blockchain. They claim, the use of blockchain along with other technologies such as cloud, AI and IoT makes it a powerful force with the ability to disrupt many a sector.

“If one looks back, AI as a technology got a lot more decentralized with innovative applications getting built that fond usability in many an areas in 2018 whereas Blockchain didn’t pick up much as it requires certain level of maturity of the ecosystem to embrace this technology,” said Phanindra Sama, CIO of Telangana government, and founder of redBus. “I think, 2019 will be the year of blockchain because AWS has just introduced blockchain services on their cloud platform which will enable entrepreneurs build applications on that technology democratising its adoption.”