In brief
- Coinbase looked at 100 Fortune 500 companies and found that 60% were investing in or working on blockchain-related projects.
- Stablecoin use is surging, too.
- More companies are planning to use the technology.
About three in five Fortune 500 companies are working on blockchain initiatives, Coinbase found in its State of Crypto second quarter report based on questions posed to executives from these firms.
Roughly half the participants said that their companies had increased spending on blockchain while one in five said it was a key part of their firms’ strategies, although many also expressed concerns about regulation.
“So, the future of money is here and it has only just begun,” the report said. “But it’s clear greater regulatory certainty is still required for the potential of crypto to be fully realized.”
The report underscores the growing embrace of digital assets and their underlying technology with many companies that were once crypto skeptics now part of the mix of adopters. Financial services powerhouses BlackRock and Goldman Sachs are among others, have kickstarted blockchain initiatives but the survey found that companies in a range of industries and sizes have also incorporated blockchain into their businesses.
The number of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using blockchain has doubled over the past year, with more than 80% of these firms saying that crypto could help them “address at least one of their financial pain points,” Coinbase found.
“The future of money is nowhere more visible than among small and medium businesses, the backbone of the U.S. economy,” the report said. “Onchain technology, especially for payments, holds great appeal to a group who see transaction fees and processing times as their top financial related pain points.”
Blockchain is the underlying tech on which Bitcoin‘s network runs: a distributed, online ledger that records transactions and cannot easily be tampered with as it uses cryptography.
The technology has now lots of other uses, other than payments, with the likes of Walmart using it to track its food supply chain and major banks deploying it for their own financial products.
A number of small Nasdaq-listed companies have started buying Bitcoin as a way to secure better returns for their shareholders, a trend popularized by Strategy—formerly MicroStrategy—which pivoted from software development to become a Bitcoin treasury and now manages more than 582,000 BTC worth over $62 billion.
The survey also found that 18% of the small and medium businesses surveyed used stablecoins. Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to the value of non-volatile assets—typically the dollar.
Coinbase contracted a third party to undertake the research, which looked at 100 of the Fortune 500 firms. It said that the initiatives included “internal company projects, investments, partnerships, and product/service launches.”
Edited by James Rubin
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