And here’s why companies are choosing blockchain technology and its various applications.

After the long “blockchain winter”, 2019 finally saw the rise of companies interested in adopting blockchain. According to recruitment portal Hired, global demand for blockchain engineers grew 517% in 2019, four times more than for any other types of engineers. 

Another interesting fact is that 83% of large companies see strong cases for blockchain, as reported on Deloitte’s 2019 Global Blockchain Survey. 

The same study shows that these companies plan to invest US$5 million or more in blockchain initiatives in the next 12 months. This is a clear sign that blockchain adoption in corporate companies is becoming mainstream.

These investments are spread across various types of industries. Technology, media and telecom are the top industries, followed by Energy & Resources and Manufacturing.

This is definitely the first and most important step for blockchain mass adoption. But why has blockchain become an almost unanimous choice across various industries and different sectors? 

There has been a shift in tech belief: many industry leaders, even those wary of technological innovations have now a shared belief that blockchain is a straightforward and secure solution —and that it can serve as a pragmatic solution to business problems and use cases across different industry sectors.

In reality, blockchain is not a “one-size fits all” solution. Industries differ in any number of ways, the difference for a successful transition to the blockchain, is how the technology can advance companies’ respective strategic priorities.

Blockchain can work beyond its original purpose – most of us first heard about it through cryptocurrencies – and now, we are discovering more and more different applications of the technology. 

Other well-known blockchain applications are data validation, ID protection, payments, supply chain management, land registry, and much more. 

A Blockchain use case in action

One of the most important of blockchain applications, and yet often overlooked, is user onboarding and validation. While there are several blockchain solutions for this, many like IBM and Hyperledger are geared for enterprise and multinationals, thereby making it cost-prohibitive to startups. Others are coming up too, like Aikon’s flagship product ORE ID, which promotes a simple and efficient user onboarding and blockchain identity management service. ORE ID handles account creation, multisig accounts, password resets, signing transactions, and resource management – and it’s offered through a REST API and Javascript libraries that make it easy enough for any developer to use.

The number of partners onboarding like Algorand and the WAX (Worldwide Asset eXchange) blockchain suggests that seamless onboarding that allows a truly friction-free experience that the user may not even need to know or understand that they are on the blockchain — is the way to go. 

DApps and enterprise adoption of blockchain solutions will find such user-friendly solutions attractive because not everyone is going to be able to, nor even want to, manage their RAM, gas, or respective account resources that are necessary to interact with the blockchain.

This is a win-win solution for companies and developers. Companies like Aikon will do all the heavy lifting on businesses that don’t want to create a special role just to manage the backend chain infrastructure for their business just to use the blockchain.

And users won’t even know they’re on the blockchain. Early adopters? That ship’s sailed.

This article originally appeared on aikon.com.