Cooperation VS Competition: Which is the development trend of blockchain technology?

From the financial and insurance industries to the gaming industry, large companies and startups are exploring and implementing blockchain projects. So are they in competition with each other or do they share a common goal?

Blockchain has the potential to disrupt large enterprises, which means that household names are expected to become early adopters of this technology. In fact, large enterprises have already started to take action, establishing various blockchain alliances and launching various projects. However, most of these projects, such as JP Morgan's ETH (forked) private chain and Santader's CashETH, are launched with the purpose of gaining a competitive advantage.

The rise of blockchain technology has also brought about an emerging strategy: competitive cooperation. As the industry is still in its early stages of development, most participants can only cooperate to stabilize the network architecture, explore the practicality of blockchain technology, encourage innovation in the technology, and establish a specific working model.

The method used by multinational company Thomson Reuters to popularize blockchain technology is to encourage developers to participate in the deployment of public or private chains, so as to achieve retraining of personnel and obtain the required talents. The public chain field will benefit from this because this method provides more talents for network development, and at the same time, multinational companies can improve work efficiency and reduce operating costs.

However, this approach will bring new competition factors. Some talented people may be dissatisfied with the slow progress of large enterprises in blockchain research and launch their own projects. But even at this point, it cannot be regarded as direct competition, but more like competitive cooperation. Although some blockchain startups try to disrupt various industries, most of them are committed to providing services to large enterprises or even seeking cooperation with large enterprises.

A single platform solution?

Announcing the open source release of Corda, James Carlyle, Chief Engineer at R3, said:

We hope that other banks and institutions can develop products and innovate on the Corda platform, but we don’t want to see everyone create their own platform...because in the end we will be isolated like islands and unable to communicate with each other...If our product development is concentrated on one platform, it will have a similar effect to the Internet. In this way, we can communicate with each other while achieving innovation.

Corda is just one of many blockchain platforms, including Hyperledger and ETH. Although they are competitors, there are also some news of cooperation. Recently, the Hyperledger project announced its cooperation with the ETH community.

However, the relationship between ETH and Bitcoin is an exception. Although ETH has always emphasized that it has no intention of competing with Bitcoin, the speculative impact during the DAO hard fork (taking advantage of and creating fluctuations in the prices of various assets to make profits) shows that the Bitcoin community has always regarded ETH as a potential threat. A few days ago, the heated discussion between Vitalik Buterin (founder of ETH) and Gregory Maxwell (CTO of Blockstream) on Reddit also indirectly confirmed the contradiction between the two parties.

This is the exact opposite of the rest of the blockchain space. Competitive collaboration has always been a staple of early technology development, and the Internet went through a similar process. Despite rumors that Apple and Microsoft are at odds, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs chose to work together in the early days of digital transformation when the market size was limited. Therefore, in the early days of blockchain technology, companies should first focus on fully developing the technology’s potential, rather than simply maintaining a hostile state.

Similarly, as the market value of digital currency exceeds 10 billion US dollars, the blockchain field should also pay less attention to competition and focus more on how to integrate digital currency into the existing framework. Because the blockchain and digital currency fields still need to expand their user base, this has created a situation of competitive cooperation.