Beyond Blockchain

Abstract

Even as the blockchain bubble bursts, the legacy of decades of work in cryptography is now beginning to ripple through into commercial reality. And the blockchain's ecosystem may prove to be fertile ground for many of these techniques to be tried to see how well they can work at scale. However, continuing problems of computational overhead may mean both zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and their derivatives wind up being squeezed into niches where only they can satisfy a need. Elsewhere, the market may well continue to make do with what it can using classic public-key encryption and computing devices.