In this chapter, we've discussed the near-term likely future of blockchain technology. It is impossible to know the future, but from what can be gauged, these are the industry trends and forces shaping the technology as it exists today. For those businesses investigating blockchain, each of these three major trends will act to either encourage blockchain adoption or cause avoidance. We hope that the governments of the world issue clear and well thought out regulation as soon as possible, as well as put in place safeguards to prevent fraud. With this in place, this technological evolution will have more guidance in terms of how to bring blockchain products to market safely and with less risk.

Blockchains, in general, will continue to be applied to different industries. It is unknown what new networks such as EOS and Cosmos will bring to the table, as no major chain has yet had the extensive governance models that these systems seek to provide. If large-scale, decentralized governance is able to perform well, it would be an encouraging development for many systems. For instance, the government of Estonia is already doing trials with blockchain for some of their government functions.

Most likely, the current blockchain systems will not be the dominant ones in the end. As with most technologies, the dominant systems will be the ones built on the lessons learned from the current crop of failures.