Review of 33 high-profile blockchain projects within the financial sector and interviews with execs shows the limitations of blockchain and its weak adoption
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two years ago Nasdaq Inc (NDAQ.O) and Citigroup Inc (C.N) announced a new blockchain system they said would make payments …
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands at the midpoint of a decade-long arc. The investigation wave began when more than a dozen big banks and tech firms started probing blockchain in 2015, followed by direct bets like the $30M Chain round backed by Visa, Nasdaq, Capital One, and Citi. By 2017, Google, Citi, and Goldman Sachs ranked among the technology's biggest investors as hundreds of millions flowed into blockchain products.
The Reuters finding of weak adoption across 33 high-profile projects gave early structure to doubts that had been building since arguments that blockchain's trustless design solves a problem finance doesn't have. The pattern it documented was confirmed by the ASX abandoning its blockchain replacement for trading, clearing, and settlement three years later — though the FT's later reporting on regulators accepting tokenized assets shows the technology found a narrower path back.
First-order effects
- Nasdaq and Citi's announced blockchain payments system becomes a case study in the gap between launch announcements and production usage, pressuring both firms to justify or quietly shelve the work.
- Blockchain startups serving the financial sector, of the kind funded in the Chain round, face a shrinking pipeline as the 33 reviewed projects expose how few moved past pilots.
Second-order effects
- Banks that anchored the 2015-2017 investment wave are forced to reframe their blockchain spending as research rather than deployment, shifting vendor negotiations toward narrower, permissioned use cases.
- Exchanges watching the ASX's clearing-and-settlement project gain evidence for demanding harder ROI proof before committing to similar rebuilds.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise blockchain in finance survives not as the trustless replacement its backers pitched but as tokenized assets inside regulated market infrastructure — the outcome the FT later documents.
- The episode sets a template for evaluating distributed-ledger claims: adoption metrics and cleared transactions, not consortium announcements, become the credibility test for institutional fintech.
The trend: Financial-sector blockchain is cycling from broad consortium experimentation toward narrow, regulator-approved tokenization, with failed pilots like the ASX's marking the pivot.