Global spending on blockchain services and technologies could reach US$8.1 billion by 2021.
Toby Ingleton |
Global spending on blockchain technology is set to increase substantially over the next few years, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
With companies around the world looking at how best to harness the potential that blockchain has, IDC predicts that much of the investment in blockchain technology will be in the business service and technology service markets.
IDC has forecast that global spending on blockchain services will grow from US$1.8 billion this year to US$8.1 billion in 2021. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 80%.
Michael Versace, a research director on IDC’s Digital Strategy Consulting team, sees a number of reasons for investment in blockchain technologies.
“IDC believes the short-term blockchain services opportunity is small but strategically important, as developers, vendors, and their customers work out the standards and protocols and promote blockchain capabilities as a ‘trust and scale’ alternative to traditional database, ETL, and OLTP applications,” said Versace. “Over the long-term horizon, blockchain services, including business consulting, IT consulting, custom development, and managed services, have the potential to become foundational to a new generation of enterprise IT infrastructure, resulting in a growing demand for consultants and developers and hundreds of billions of dollars of market size for the service company of the future.”