Valued at $28.93billion in 2024 and set to hit $49.18billion in 2025, according to The Business Research Company, the blockchain market is thriving. While this growth is in part due to the success of the crypto industry, the blockchain industry is not dependent on crypto. In light of this, this May we are looking to spotlight blockchain’s use cases and where the tech is going next.
As stated by industry experts in our article on blockchain’s development when compared to AI, the blockchain market is booming quietly in the background. However, will its success still be quiet in five years time or will it be the biggest fintech buzzword once again?
Developing and offering financial services will be cheaper
There are multiple factors taking place in the blockchain industry right now, which makes it difficult to have just one prediction says Paul Brody, global blockchain leader, EY, the consulting, assurance, tax and transaction services provider. Focusing on financial services, he says they “look especially big right now.
“Lower cost and faster processing means payments between people and companies are going to move on chain. A new wave of financial assets is going to be born on-chain as well, along with a complete set of banking services. Because tokenisation allows you turn any asset into a financial asset, how people think about investments will change a great deal as well.
“Today, most investments are made in a limited set of options such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Blockchain will make it easy for people to buy nearly any kind of asset from real estate in any country to investing in start-ups. There will be a lot of regulatory challenges to manage along the way, but as they get worked out, we will end up with a much bigger set of investment choices.
“Financial services will get much cheaper to develop and offer. The cost of financial services is high, but often invisible. A good example: ‘Free Savings’ accounts in the US actually typically cost about $200 for banks to manage each year. Banks recover those costs with transaction fees and other charges, but there is no free lunch. One way or another, lower costs will flow back into lower prices or fewer fees.
“While financial services, especially payments and tokenised assets, get the most attention, I am also optimistic about industrial applications.
“This means using blockchains to do things like manage procurement contracts, track inventories, and verify the sources of raw materials. Adoption of these capabilities has been especially slow because of the lack of blockchain privacy tools. Now these tools are coming on-line and the cost to use them is dropping, we hope to see more companies taking advantage of these.
“The first scalable blockchain privacy networks are coming this year. Enterprise users are slow to move, however, so expect a steady build of adoption not an overnight surge.”
Making the blockchain ‘digital seal’ the norm
With sensitive documents going digital and becoming more attractive targets for fraudsters, Thomas Berndorfer, CEO of Connecting Software, the software integration platform and SaaS solution provider, explains that blockchain’s biggest impact in the next five years will come as a way to verify legitimacy of documents in a world where fakes are becoming increasingly hard to spot.
“Financial services rely on sensitive documents, like invoices, contracts and statements, constantly. Increasingly, however, these documents have become attractive targets for fraud – digital document forgeries increased 244 per cent between 2023 and 2024. Within the next five years, blockchain-based verification tools will become increasingly vital for financial companies as digital document fraud becomes more available to bad actors.
“Solutions that utilise the blockchain can allow users to create a tamper-proof “digital seal” for documents in any business application. This represents a long hash associated with a document’s state with an immutable timestamp. If the document is altered in any way, it can never create a matching hash and will be flagged as invalid. Only this digital seal, as opposed to the document itself, is shared on the blockchain, making the solution compliant with all relevant data protection regulations.
“The advantage of the blockchain is that once information is stored within its network it is impossible to alter with current available technologies because it is decentralised among thousands of devices globally. This means financial organisations can trust that once a document is sealed and verified, it can be trusted as the best possible guarantee of authenticity achievable technologically.”
Preparing for flexible settlement frameworks
According to Grigore Roșu, founder and CEO of Pi Squared, the most advanced verifiable settlement layer for AI and crypto, traditional blockchains exist and are already becoming outdated if they fail to become flexible.
“Blockchains, if they evolve, could make their biggest impact as modular, scalable layers that verify, rather than totally order, all activity. Systems like Linera give us a glimpse at a post-blockchain future, in which flexible settlement frameworks will likely dominate. Market implications are clear: protocols that embrace leaner, post-blockchain architectures will drive the next infrastructure wave, while traditional blockchains risk being sidelined.”
Blockchain will go where transparency is needed
In the next five years, it will be the markets that require transparency where blockchain thrives says head of marketing at Backed Finance, David Henderson.
“We are already seeing the impact it can have when we look at the global trade disputes that are taking place. Blockchain infrastructure is not only decentralised but also aims to be completely transparent. So, I think that in the next five years, we are going to see blockchain infrastructure integrate with many essential services, such as the trade of goods, sustainability practices, and consumer practices.”
Real-world assets are going digital
Sharing similar views on transparency and trust, Pablo Gerboles Parilla, the founding director at Alive DevOps, an IT provider and software development services company, said: “Blockchain will revolutionise identity and reputation, making credibility portable, transparent, and immune to manipulation. We’ll move from institutional trust to on-chain proof of character. At the same time, real-world assets will go fully digital — enabling smart contracts to manage property, lending, and legal rights autonomously. The result: a world where trust, ownership, and value flow peer-to-peer, without friction or permission.”
