The Public-Private Blockchain Singularity May Be Close At Hand

Nearly a year ago, at Consensus 2017, I bumped into blockchain lawyer Marco Santori, who made an interesting observation.

The industry was in a transition phase, as the "Blockchain not bitcoin" talk of 2015 and 2016 was getting old and cryptocurrencies were about to come back with a vengeance, fueled in part by the initial coin offering boom.

Both the enterprise blockchain and crypto sectors of the industry were well represented among the crowd of 2,700 gathered in New York.

The crypto enthusiasts, for their part, were perhaps bitter about the condescending attitude that "Blockchain 2.0" types had taken toward bitcoin, the very innovation they claimed inspired them.

Early adopters who believed this technology could change the world for the better were also a bit underwhelmed by the enterprise crowd's comparatively prosaic goals - and skeptical that a "Private blockchain" could even work.

First, an executive from the energy giant BP said it's open to working with companies that have done ICOs and and that it might even consider using a public blockchain one day.

Granted, the project uses a proprietary blockchain from a startup called AdJoint.

As CoinDesk reported earlier this month, Hyperledger, one of the big enterprise blockchain consortiums, has started opening its code to ICO projects.

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