Blockchain framework  137

Blockchain projects need to make sure to comply with these laws

as well; however, there are no firm laws which are directly related

to blockchain. Businesses need to make sure to comply with these

laws even if the blockchain data protection regulation is not clear.

• Difficulty to establish a blockchain eco-system: As highlighted before,

a successful blockchain project should have multiple parties within a

consortium. To get a value from the blockchain project, it is essential

to establish an eco-system with multiple parties with similar interests

and goals. Businesses often find it difficult to get buy-in from different

parties to create a blockchain eco-system with several parties.

• Trust issues amongst parties: There are often trust issues between par-

ties due to various reasons like competition and uncertainty on regula-

tions. In the existing financial system, there are strict regulations, rules

and standards. All parties within the existing financial system need to

comply with the local and global regulations. However, the regulations,

standards and rules are still not clear when it comes to blockchain.

This is the main reason why companies are reluctant to trust each other

within the consortium. This point is also closely related to the above

point of ‘Difficulty to establish a Blockchain eco-system’. The other

aspect of trust issue is amongst end users. End users of the blockchain

are still reluctant to trust the technology fully. Some of the main factors

of lack of trust can potentially be regulations and blockchain education.

• Difficulty in establishing a consortium: Establishing a consortium

with parties with similar business interests is essential to establish a

successful permissioned blockchain. Although there has been substan-

tial progress on a variety of consortiums in financial and supply chain

sectors, there are a very few of them that have gone to mainstream

production use case. Companies are finding it difficult to convince

other parties to join their consortium. There can be a variety of rea-

sons, but the key ones are intellectual property (IP) concerns, trust

issues, financial gain distribution conflicts, and so on.

• Intellectual property concerns: IP concerns is a key point that acts as

another potential blocker for blockchain adoption. Within a permis-

sioned blockchain, parties within a consortium have concerns surround-

ing who will own the IP for the innovative project. There is workaround

like sharing an IP with all key parties, but lack of trust and percentage

of control dither parties to agree on common grounds for IP ownership.

• Scalability issues: The key private and hybrid blockchain products

still have significant scalability issues against the existing technology

used for use cases like payments and data storage. There are many

blockchain start-ups in pipelines to solve the scalability issues of

blockchain, so we will see multiple solutions in near future.

• Performance issues: Blockchain performance issues are also a key point

impacting the adoption. The existing use cases in financial and data

use cases offer thousands of TPS (transaction per second) performance

KPI (key performance indicators); however, blockchain products are

still lacking this kind of TPS. Again, there are many start-ups working