Web Pioneer Tries to Incubate a Second Digital Revolution

“Even in the most boring of circumstances, these technologies could lead to fairer, more objective outcomes for people up and down the economic stack,” says Behlendorf.

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Hyperledger itself formed a working group last month that will propose projects in health care. Making it easier for patients to move their medical records between providers is one area of interest. The government has spent billions to advance the idea of portable electronic health records. But progress has been slow because organizations see keeping patient data siloed as a competitive advantage. Attempts by Google and Microsoft to build repositories for health data have fallen flat.
Companies, researchers, and even the U.S. government are now considering how blockchains could break the deadlock. Behlendorf argues that the technology could create infrastructure that gives patients primary control over their data. “This is an industry that is in need of additional ideas on how to share,” he says.
Over the next year, experimentation from Hyperledger and others will start to provide more concrete evidence of whether the technology can deliver disruptive ideas like that, says Chris Curran, chief technologist at PwC, which is working with companies in finance and other sectors interested in blockchains. “We’re coming to a moment when we’ll find out if this really can reinvent industries,” he says.