Eighty one of the world’s 100 biggest publicly traded companies by market cap have “adopted blockchain in their business model,” rating agency Moody’s exclaimed last week. A (very) quick check of the relevant data suggests the figure is a tad overblown.
Per Moody’s:
Many companies are testing and adopting blockchain technology solutions for their business. For example, financial institutions are developing blockchain infrastructures to transfer funds among subsidiaries at lower costs, higher speed and lower overhead to keep track of money inflow by means of an electronic distributed ledger. Manufacturing firms are employing blockchain to improve the traceability of goods and commodities across the whole supply chain.
As of September 2021, 81 of the top 100 publicly traded companies had adopted blockchain within their business model . . .
It’s unclear whether Moody’s analysts read the press release from which the figure was taken all the way to the bottom: the claim becomes more and more diluted the further one scrolls.
The data came from wide-eyed blockchain analysis company Blockdata (tagline: “Accelerating. Blockchain. Adoption”). First, its list of 81 companies “includes those who are in a research phase, meaning they are exploring opportunities and deciding on which technologies they could use for their blockchain initiatives”.
“If we remove the research phase,” the post continues, “we find that there are still an impressive 65 companies who are actively developing blockchain solutions.”
The claim is watered down even more in a separate post. It turns out only 44 of the top 100 companies have “actively pursued blockchain strategies” in the past year.
Just five of those 44 companies are “financials”. Tortured English aside, Moody’s assertion that “we are witnessing the rapid adoption of financial institutions developing blockchain infrastructure to increase the speed and efficiency of fund transfers” simply does not stand up.