Well over a decade after the birth of Bitcoin, the technology known as the blockchain is alive and healthy. The blockchain takes various forms, ranging from permissioned consortium chain to widely decentralized permissionless public networks. Blockchains often support the minting and peer-to-peer transfer of native cryptocurrency as well as a virtual machine and language that allow users to deploy custom smart contracts.

At Orange Silicon Valley, we remain abreast of the wide variety of new blockchain base layers (often referred to as L1) and the design innovations and tradeoffs that are inherent in their implementations. The variety of innovation can be seen in terms of new consensus algorithms and sybil resistance mechanism, as well as design decisions undertaken to scale transaction throughput and decrease time to finality, to improve safety and security, or to increase user privacy. Blockchains also use higher layer (L2) technologies to achieve scale; these may take the form of state or payment channels, rollups, or side chains. In our multi-blockchain world, advancing the technology to bridge or interoperate between blockchains has assumed great importance.

A movement toward more decentralization has advanced the uses of this technology. Decentralized finance (DeFI); non-fungible tokens (NFT) and collectables; and decentralized or self-sovereign identity all represent important use cases. At Orange Silicon Valley, we also take keen interest in how the crypto-economics and decentralized governance are used to enable new decentralized business models based on the incentivized use of an open-source technology.

The interplay of the technical, financial, and organization innovations are poised to shape the next decade of decentralization based on blockchain technology.