🪐 Starship enterprise

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The first wave of enterprise blockchains washed over crypto between 2015 and, let’s say, 2018.

About a decade later, crypto is on track to finally get it right. 

On today’s Empire podcast, Kyle Samani shares a plan to run his now-deeply funded Solana DAT firm, Forward Industries, entirely onchain. Let’s get to it!

🖖 Common enterprise blockchains

“ You know, SEC Chair Atkins just gave a speech six weeks or seven weeks ago,” Samani told Yano. “He said, ‘We're gonna bring US securities markets onchain.’ That process is a difficult process, and someone has to be the guinea pig and just do all of the weird stuff. And so we are gonna be that guinea pig.”

Samani outlined what would be a multi-year process to transition as much of the business as possible onchain — including payroll, paying vendors, and so on, as well as capital markets functions: equity issuance, capital raises, dividends, stock splits, governance, shareholder votes. 

“We are going to try and do all of that natively onchain, and in doing so, we can obviously prove to the world that any other company can do so as well. Someone has to be first and just do all that weird stuff, and we intend to be first at doing all of that weird stuff. I think that's super important for the long-term success of Solana,” he said.

Samani’s quest tracks with the mission statement of Inversion Capital, the private equity vehicle spearheaded by Empire co-host Santiago Roel Santos. Inversion is pushing to buy up companies, reinvigorate them with blockchain for max efficiency, all while reaping the benefits by holding them forever, Warren Buffett style.

With these two efforts converging on the same timeline, it’s high time crypto reclaims the term “enterprise blockchain.”

Enterprise blockchain quickly became a pejorative following the series of failures outside of the crypto space. Private digital ledgers owned and operated by a corporation were always bound to be less exciting than actual blockchains, but they proliferated largely thanks to tools and frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Corda.

IBM’s Food Trust, for instance, was a blockchain platform that would bring transparency and efficiency to our food supply chains. At the consumer level, it allowed us to scan a QR code, which served a link showing where our potatoes come from, for example. The data was tracked and served via a blockchain system.

Shipping giant Maersk’s TradeLens intended to do the same thing, but for the back-end of the global supply chains. TradeLens was discontinued in 2022 due to lack of interest and commercial viability, putting an unceremonious end to arguably the most ambitious attempt at integrating blockchain into the raw vital functions of the world’s economy.

The Australian Stock Exchange’s own attempt was perhaps more relevant. Starting in 2016, the plan was to convert its failing CHESS settlement system entirely over to a distributed ledger. That plan was also abandoned in 2022 due to poor performance of the prototype, despite having sunk AU$250 million ($166.5 million) into the project. The debacle led the Australian securities regular to sue the ASX, and the case is still ongoing.

Typical crypto investors would likely find none of these projects particularly interesting. They don’t feature any coins, for one, and good luck quantifying the value accrual to Maersk’s stock price related to porting its shipping logs onto the blockchain.

Luckily, we are about to enter another era of blockchain in businesses, one that’s potentially much more thrilling than in prior cycles. 

There’s a markedly different approach this time around: Rather than porting entire, monolithic industries onto private blockchain rails, it’s believed to be more effective to simply build brand-new businesses native to permissionless blockchains from the ground up. It’s a very “test in prod” method of cooking up proof-of-concepts. 

Let’s say Samani, through Forward Industries, succeeds in showing that it’s possible to run a thriving capital markets business entirely onchain — on Solana. Then, perhaps, whatever activity that comes with it might actually accrue value to SOL, and not just to Forward Industries stock, or Multicoin’s many portfolio companies across the Solana ecosystem.

If the average investor is left out, however, odds are we’ll be waiting for a third wave of enterprise blockchain initiatives to finally figure it out. 

Full episode will drop today on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

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Katana was built by answering a core question: What if a chain contributed revenue back into the ecosystem to drive growth and yield?

We direct revenue back to DeFi participants for consistently higher yields.

Katana is pioneering concepts like Productive TVL (the portion of assets are actually doing work), Chain Owned Liquidity (permanent liquidity owned by Katana to maintain stability), and VaultBridge (putting bridged assets to work generating extra yield for active participants).

• The aggregate NAV of crypto treasury companies was at all-time high on Friday: $103 billion, per Blockworks Research data.

• The London Stock Exchange has processed its first blockchain-powered transaction, a capital raise for a private MembersCap fund (Financial Times). 

• Monero has suffered an 18-block reorg, its largest ever, effectively erasing 36 minutes of transaction activity (Decrypt).

It’s the summer of DATs and the party is going strong. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

Get your ticket today with promo code: EMPIRENL

📅 October 13-15 | London