Resurrecting Enterprise Blockchain in 2026

Which dinosaurs shall we bring back to life first?

2026 is the year of resurrecting 2016-2022 era enterprise blockchain use cases.

Many of the reasons these prior projects failed have now been overcome.

I started working on enterprise blockchain projects in 2018.

We were helping banks put identify on-chain: KYC interoperability in the Caribbean. The government backed it and everything. But market timing wasn't right. Got stuck.

Here's some lessons learned to guide the next generation of enterprise blockchain applications...

What Are Good Enterprise Blockchain Use Cases?

The best enterprise blockchain use cases are financial management and personal data management.

Why?

Financial Management

Major enterprises often have between a few and few dozen entities across jurisdictions globally.

These entities move money between one another frequently, and are at the mercy of banks, wires, SWIFT, currency exchange fees, and other tradfi bullshit.

Imagine how large these fees are, with hundreds of millions in volume being moved monthly.

With crypto (including their own token) companies can move large volumes at low fees, and access higher yield opportunities offered by tradfi.

There's a 100 great mini use cases in here.

Personal Data Management

Handling PII (personal identifiable information) is a huge liability for companies in the year 2026. With more countries passing laws like GDPR and CCPA for data protection, there is a boatload of compliance necessary when companies touch PII. This is making a lot of companies completely avoid touching PII, or hiring expensive data management firms to manage compliance for them.

By having PII be self-custodied and provable via zk and other tech, enterprises can avoid touching it.

That, and there's obvious consumer benefits: data privacy, and the UX benefits of interop identity.

Also a ton of use cases here.

Warning: Historic Points of Failure

One of the big reasons enterprise blockchain projects failed in the past is they couldn't make it past pilot stage.

This was NOT because the tech wasn't good, or the use cases weren't good.

it was mainly because we were selling the wrong way.

Cause of Death

most enterprise blockchain projects from 2016-2022 died because either:

a. the execs killed it because of regulatory risk worries

b. the pilot did an "Innovation Lab death spiral"

issue a. is a non-issue now.

so we're left with b.

Avoiding the Innovation Lab Death Spiral

In all forms of enterprise sales, everything starts with a pilot: providing an example use case where you solve one small problem with your tech for their team, and then use that to get more internal buy-in. Most enterprise software is white-glove: so you basically work with their team to make one simple implementation.

In the past, most of these pilots were sold to the enterprise's Innovation Lab (the department that is responsible for R&D and usually completely siloed from the company's overall operations). Innovation Labs are usually easy to reach out to, and full of engineering-oriented people who are interested in emerging tech.

All us enterprise blockchain people almost exclusively sold into Innovation Labs for years.

What we realized over time (and what we could have totally just learned by talking to other people selling emerging tech to enterprises) was that 95% of Innovation Lab projects never make it out of the lab. Innovation labs are more or less glorified tax write-offs (R&D credits) and don't often produce things that the enterprise intends to use.

To get something out of an innovation lab is a Herculean lift that I saw work a total of 0 times.

The real way to get enterprise blockchain adoption: sell to executives. You have to get buy-in from the very top.

This is one of the reasons Maersk Tradelens was able to get a real implementation of blockchain for logistics live in 2019. IBM pitched it to them, and they got buy-in from the very top. (Yes, I know Tradelens failed due to governance issues some years later, but that's a story for another time).

A Note on Messaging

I know I used the words "enterprise blockchain" a lot in this article, but please don't call it enterprise blockchain when you talk to actual enterprises.

Calling what you're building "enterprise blockchain" is like Salesforce calling themselves "mongoDB tech". Blasphemy.

Call it like data interoperability, or finance interoperability, or whatever is the actual problem you're solving is!

That's all on that. Don't be stupid!

Time to Play God

2026 is the year of resurrecting 2016-2022 era enterprise blockchain use cases, and I'm so here for it.

Which dinosaurs shall we bring back to life first?