Interest has increased tremendously over the past few years: venture capital investment and the number of blockchain-related patent applications are rising and more and more businesses are moving from testing minimal viable products to considering larger scale live deployments or investing heavily in order to develop their own proprietary blockchain software.

The key features of blockchain technology, such as the ability to record and store information on distributed databases, immutability and the ability to cut out intermediaries makes them attractive for industries as wide-ranging as financial services (e.g. assisting with post-trade reporting) to logistics (e.g. streamlining supply chain solutions by allowing multiple stakeholders to access the same database to track information on goods).