The State of Decentralization Report measures and surfaces insights on the adoption of public and private distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) across various roles, industries, geographies, use cases, and company sizes. I’m happy to announce that the inaugural State of Decentralization Report is now available for download.

At Hedera Hashgraph, the Co-Founder and CEO Mance Harmon has previously cited 2021 as the year of scale. We’re well into 2021 and watching this happen in real-time through multiple lenses: the adoption of distributed ledger technologies in aggregate, transactions coming from applications that offer real business value, and, for Hedera Hashgraph, the addition of governing council membership to drive further decentralization of its network. As of April 2021, the Hedera mainnet reached one billion transactions and the Governing Council is up to twenty members. Using this initial State of Decentralization Report, we can use this survey data as a baseline for subsequent reports to assess the scale of DLT adoption in the coming years.

I personally have experience working at emerging technology and open-source startups — working at Hedera and within the public distributed ledger space has felt different. Even with the vast number of people keeping tabs on the DLT space at large, my sense has always been that we’re very early but couldn’t fully quantify it. Thanks to our 925 survey respondents, this picture is starting to become more transparent.

Here are a few data points that surfaced as survey insights from the report:

• 37% of survey respondents believe that DLTs will cause significant disruption within their industry in one to three years. 31% of survey respondents believe that DLTs will cause significant disruption within their industry in over three years.

  
  

• 35% of survey respondents believe DLTs are still in the innovation stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. While 55% believe DLTs are already in the early adoption stage of the life cycle.

• Over 90% of survey respondents are still in some degree of development of their project. That’s a lot of people still developing but at the same time, real adoption is happening.

For more insights and a deeper look into real-world adoption of DLTs, check out the State of Decentralization Report.