A Review of Blockchain Use Cases and Recent Failures in the Enterprise

Blockchain technology has facilitated decentralized digital transformation by enabling peer-to-peer transactions and eliminating intermediaries. It blends a set of useful properties, such as decentralization, transparency, immutability, and traceability, making it applicable to various use cases. However, the number of enterprise blockchain solutions reaching production stages is limited. Additionally, challenges and failures have extended to the use of blockchain to manage supply chains, which is one of the most promising applications of blockchain. This paper reviews blockchain opportunities, use cases, and challenges in the enterprise. It examines the recent setbacks of blockchain-based supply chain projects and discusses factors that may have impacted their progress. Considering these factors should help to avoid similar future project failures. Consequently, we recommend extending the current blockchain’s decision frameworks to cover and mitigate them. Moreover, we propose a high-level risk management process that is inspired by the practices of implementing large-scale enterprise projects. Blockchain projects should learn from and apply these project management practices and frameworks that have a large body of knowledge accumulated for decades.