Of course they all want to make sure they are not under-invested, because this is the greatest opportunity. But there is another not loudly spoken reason.. that is…
Tech companies rush to create standards, once you establish your standard as the default, or the stack on which everything is build, you become tollgate and your profits are assured. So US companies wants to ensure that the world AI runs on their tech stack and not on China’s. They understand China is pretty close, and Biden administration’s bone-headed move of blocking US technology, actually helped China to move ahead. So the US companies not only trying to offer a better compelling product, but also moving the timeline very fast, and crowding out any other efforts.
As a whole, if US companies ends up capturing the world market, all these bubble talk would look in hind-sight pretty silly.
I mean, it really does depend on the size of the world market, doesn’t it? If the end product of all of this is really a super-intelligent God-Agent or omniscient robots, then the world market is very very large. If the end product is much more modest, then the bubble talk may end up being wholly justified.
Again, blockchain is an instructive parallel. Virtually every company had blockchain pilots in 2017-2018, covering every possible business application and use case imaginable. None of them wanted to be left behind if blockchain ended up being a truly revolutionary tech that displaced conventional methods of information management. The application space for blockchain ended up being pretty limited, though, and nearly all of those pilot efforts ended up being abandoned after a few years.
Not at all. Except you, I have not seen anyone make this comparison. Everyone make the comparison with “Internet”, because this is a breakthrough technology like that. You can draw whatever comparison comes to your mind, but it will benefit everyone if we can be within the realms of objectivity.
Not really. Cryptocurrency is definitely a use case for blockchain, and it’s not surprising that JPM and other financial institutions are looking at those tokens as a viable business area. But nearly all of the manifold other uses for blockchain - the idea that it would supplant nearly everything to become Web 3.0 - have fallen by the wayside.
Is Walmart a reasonable non-banking example?
May 2025 article.
Tracking Food sources and logistics.
{ Food moves fast, but contamination moves faster. When a bag of lettuce carries disease, hours matter, and days can cost lives. Walmart’s food supply chain faced this risk in 2018. A wave of E. coli outbreaks linked to leafy greens left shoppers afraid and regulators overwhelmed.
The average traceback period took 7 days, but Walmart knew it could not allow that. The company needed a way to trace the problem in seconds to ensure the supply chain could identify the problem and respond as quickly as possible. That way, customers were safe.
Walmart turned to blockchain. }
I assume this is a low hanging fruit type use case, and as Walmart off the obstacles, the tech will be used in other Walmart applications?
I don’t know how much Walmart is actually still using blockchain. Kingran had mentioned this upthread, and I tried to get some details on what they’re actually doing - but there’s nothing much about it other than the one thing discussed in the article (tracking certain groceries), and that all seems to be just the program they implemented in 2018 that never went away. If they’re using blockchain in any other aspect of their operations, I haven’t been able to find it; or if any other retailers ever followed their lead, I can’t find those either. Which isn’t really much of an indication for blockchain’s usefulness, especially since we’re nearly a decade past the boom, and examples of actual blockchain implementation in traditional companies are very scarce (outside of exchanges trading tokens, which the banks want to get a piece of).
All the other stuff (tokenizing real estate transaction, DAO’s, “smart contracts,” replacing all existing database management systems with blockchain systems, and the like) never really went anywhere. Everyone kicked the tires on blockchain, found that it didn’t really help very much, and decided to take a pass. Only the cryptocurrency/coin trading stuff really stuck. And while that’s made a group of people wealthy, it hardly was a “Web 3.0” revolution.
This is second or third time someone has mentioned this. No one has been able to explain to me how blockchain (or whatever you want to call it) is better or faster than a well-designed database. In any system it would be a few seconds to get that information out of the DB. I’m not buying this.
First of all it is not few seconds with database, it was 7 minutes for WMT. It is my understanding that they were actually running that database in mainframe, i.e., they had pretty powerful compute. For Kraft, it was many hours, and in few cases it was beyond 48 hours…
JMO, blockchain (and tokenization) is moving forward as more obstacles are removed.
Will it be a widespread next month. I doubt it.
It’s not, yet, “perfect” cause there are still too many obstacles and the lack of experience with it.
But, I suspect “soon” as in the next 5 years.
And 20 years from now, no one will remember life without blockchain n tokenization.
Blockchain and tokenization offer “cheaper”, n “faster”.
JMO, again, cheaper n faster are powerful motivators.
The reason why blockchain hasn’t replaced things like credit cards for processing consumer payments is because it is slower and more expensive. It’s much, much more cumbersome to track things on a global decentralized blockchain platform than it is through conventional financial systems. The supposed “advantages” of doing it the blockchain way - allowing for trustlessness - isn’t actually very useful in most western developed economies, where most individuals and firms have access to financial institutions.
Similarly, tokenization hasn’t moved forward at all because blockchain doesn’t offer any real advantages over conventional securitization. The only putative advantage is “maybe not having to comply with securities laws,” which pretty much got squashed by all the prosecutions and court decisions that found that a security isn’t any less a security because you call it a “token” or a “coin.”
For whom? It appears to be cheaper and faster to transfer funds that way for large institutions instead of wire transfers but I don’t think that will necessarily work at the consumer level. Can you elaborate? Thanks.
No way. Stablecoins are way to much at risk of fraud. No way is a bank going to start allowing their customers to do stablecoin transfers - especially to third parties. And, it would likely violate many of the existing banking laws because the bank cannot verify the recipient of the funds.
The Genius Act is a Major step forward..
