Blockchain in Italy is a growing industry, and the finance and insurance sectors are the main beneficiaries of the innovations brought by this emerging technology. According to a recent report by the Observatory on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger of the Politecnico di Milano, in 2021 there will be 370 initiatives developed globally by companies and public administrations, +39% compared to 2020, bringing the total number of cases surveyed from 2016 to date to 1,615.
Implementation projects (243, +25%) are clearly growing, at the expense of mere announcements (127), bringing the total number of operational, pilot or proof-of-concept projects surveyed in the last 5 years to 751. The most active sectors are Finance with 38 percent of projects and Public Administration with 16 percent, followed by Media with 7 percent and Agrifood with 6 percent.
Blockchain as a new paradigm between efficiency and transparency
Thirteen years after its inception, blockchain today represents a paradigm and platform for innovation that enables new answers to many different needs of businesses, organizations, citizens and consumers. And while for several years knowledge of and attention to blockchain was confined mainly to the world of developers or in other ways to those who had immediately glimpsed its potential from a financial point of view, a major leap forward in terms of knowledge diffusion and expectations has taken place over the past year.
In particular, unlike other technological innovations, blockchain refers to some seemingly very different and distant themes and concepts that we do not normally associate with digital innovation: trust, accountability, community, decentralization, transparency, immutability and sharing. It is certainly also to be sought in the originality of these ingredients that make blockchain or come with blockchain that the secret of so much interest and expectation is to be found.
Blockchain and Web 3.0
Blockchain is at the heart of the "next web revolution" - Web 3.0 - that is, the new frontier of decentralized networking created to counter the overwhelming power of big tech. In this context, in fact, blockchain enables the creation of the infrastructure that enables new independent business solutions, often based on decentralized applications (so-called DApps) or the Nfts, unique tokens that represent private digital property.
Investment in this direction has grown globally by 382 percent in one year hinting at great prospects. The most interesting ecosystem of decentralized applications continues to be DeFi (Decentralized Finance), developed on "permissionless" platforms for offering financial services and products: the total value invested in these applications exceeded $250 billion in 2021 (+1,250% compared to the beginning of the year), due to the increase in the value of cryptocurrencies and tokens, capital invested and users involved. In 2021, DeFi's applications remained tied to elementary financial services, but offered their users easier and less expensive to use.
The Italian landscape between enthusiasm and hesitation
Cryptocurrencies are driving blockchain investment in Italy, while corporate adoption is still struggling to take off. Since Bitcoin's launch in 2008, the surge in popularity of cryptocurrencies is well documented. Twelve percent of Italians have already bought them, 17 percent say they are interested in doing so in the future, while 58 percent know about them but are not interested in owning them, and only 13 percent do not know about them at all.
"The Blockchain world continues to attract the interest of institutions, companies and the media," says Valeria Portale, Director of the Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Observatory. Cryptocurrencies are now widespread even among traditional players in the financial and payments world, who are considering integrating them into their offerings also as a form of investment. Nfts have exploded, which may soon be exploited in the "metaverse" as well. More and more companies are approaching the "tokenized economy," in which products, financial and digital assets will be exchanged in the form of tokens. And many are launching projects based on DLT and "smart contract" platforms.
Business applications and Nft
One area of application where there are interesting signs, but where much remains to be done, is where traditional business processes are replicated using blockchain technologies. Internationally, there are about 500 implementation projects developed by companies and public administrations (67 percent of the total surveyed as of 2016), and by 2021 they were down 19 percent. Today, most "traditional" companies focus on developing these solutions, with different objectives. 37% use "time stamping" tools, based on the immutability of the blockchain ledger, for greater data verifiability. 59% have created platforms for coordination in multi-actor relationships. Only 4 percent have also fully exploited programmability by bringing complex processes "on-chain."
In the past year, Nfts have seen an explosion , especially in the world of "collectibles," art and sports. The use of Nfts, however , extends far beyond these sectors and offers interesting solutions for the business world and public administrations. The first application cases minimally demonstrate the potential of these tools, which are applicable to various fields to enable not only an efficient and immediate transfer of ownership, and already new and interesting opportunities for use are being discovered.