How blockchain 4.0 delivers an ecosystem for business applications

Blockchain 4.0 describes a group of revolutionary advances in blockchain structure and function that makes the technology more accessible and advantageous to businesses.

Where before blockchain was too slow to process transactions and too difficult to adopt, blockchain 4.0 is characterized by equivalent speeds to normal web applications and an operating system-like development environment that allows businesses to build their own, blockchain-based Decentralized Applications (Dapps).

More important than this, though, is the transition from viewing blockchain as a tool, to viewing it as a substrate or environment.

For instance, Bitcoin’s blockchain was primarily there to support the cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency was the interesting thing about Bitcoin; the blockchain was just the method of delivering the cryptocurrency.

That’s a blockchain 1.0 mentality. You could call multi-use blockchains like Ethereum and EOS ‘blockchain 3.0’ - optimized for larger numbers of users, with more sophisticated consensus and governance systems and designed from the outset to be business-friendly and multipurpose.

The defining feature of blockchain 4.0 is that it’s envisaged from the outset as an environment.

Think about the internet: in its early days, just getting online was a kind of triumph. (Anyone who remembers communicating at an unknown rate via a 56k modem knows what we're talking about here.) There were no web apps and few websites, and most of those in existence were amateurish and unprofitable.

Fast forward a few years more and most people in the USA and the West could access the internet, but it remained a hassle - a tool. That’s where blockchain 3.0 leaves off.

Now, though, who apart from tech people ever thinks about the internet? We think of the sites and applications we use. Salesforce, Marketo, Google’s productivity suite or Microsoft’s; Amazon, eBay, Etsy; Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. That’s what we think of. The internet has become so ubiquitous that it’s disappeared. It’s just the environment all those different applications and sites happen to operate in.

Blockchain 4.0 is poised to take the technology of immutable, encrypted distributed ledgers to the same territory as packet switching technology. You can build what you want on a ‘3.0’ blockchain - if you have the skills. On blockchain 4.0, you can build, implement and operate applications - all without leaving the blockchain. An OS-type development environment is the first step toward the WYSIWIG builders similar to those we use for websites, and the app builders that let you build mobile applications without coding skills.

With blockchain 4.0 structures like genEOS, businesses can give and receive payments between themselves and other businesses; make self-executing contracts of employment and pay staff; organize permission hierarchies to make part of their application private or accessible only to certain parties; and they can do all this with technical and commercial support.

The upshot is that a business doesn’t have to have blockchain experience or know-how: they just need to have a good idea. They’re able to access the benefits of blockchain technology without paying too much attention to what goes on under the hood.

Blockchain for any business, easy to use, with appropriate support, means we can expect to see distributed ledger technology become ubiquitous; blockchain technology that’s capable of doing this is blockchain 4.0.