(Schwab, 2017) The steam engine, electricity and computer technology once made prominent landmarks in technology revolution in the human history. Today, a batch of disruptive innovations, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, machine learning, big data, 3D printing, VR/AR and gene engineering, will bring the fourth industrial revolution. This new wave of technology promises to profoundly alter every aspect of our life, significantly improve efficiency in every industry and elevate the capacity of mankind to a point that has never been reached before. At the very heart of the fourth revolution is the blockchain. This wondrous technology leverages the pervasive power of innovation and has been transforming people’s habits, needs and their way of thinking.
On January 3rd 2009, the first 50 bitcoins were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, thus establishing the genesis block.
In the following four years, the development of blockchain, such as
transactions and mining facilities, had been revolving all around the bitcoin. In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin proposed to establish 1) Ethereum, an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform that features smart contract (scripting) functionality, which facilitates online contractual agreements; 2) the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes. With these two evolutionary developments, we have entered entered blockchain 2.0. This new phase of development is all about smart contracts and how the entire slate of economic, market, and financial applications can make use of blockchain.
But what about blockchain 3.0?
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