The Blockchain Market Map

Four hours ago I left my house for the airport and was planning to blog on the flight to SF this morning. But things got in the way of that. First the pilot didn’t show. Then when he did the computer systems went down at LAX grounding all Delta flights to SF. We called an audible, booked a ticket on an American Eagle flight, and hustled to another terminal, through security, onto a shuttle bus, and finally just in time onto our flight. There’s no wifi on this plane and all the delays mean my day in SF has been compressed and will be crazy as soon as I land. 

So no time for a blog post today. 

In lieu of that, here’s a graphic from William’s excellent work to create a “market map” of the blockchain ecosystem:

Click here to read his post which goes on to list all the companies active in all of these sectors.

#hacking finance

Comments (Archived):

  1. JimHirshfield

    Nice graphic William!

  2. William Mougayar

    Thanks Fred. Glad to be a filler anytime you have flight delays 🙂

    1. JimHirshfield

      Can you get a version going with company logos, a la LumaScapes?

      1. LE

        If you click to the blog post there are logos.But as long as we are making requests here (you drew first blood on this one) I would like to not have the infinite scroll esq presentation but rather an easier way to see all the companies even find by letter etc.

        1. William Mougayar

          You can see an Alphabetical list if you hit Explore in the Silk side, and the Search is pretty good, with auto-completes, so just Type A, and all the A’s show-up, etc..http://crypto.silk.co/explo

      2. William Mougayar

        I started that way, but putting 400+ logos on a graph looked pretty messy. But in the Silk page http://crypto.silk.co/, some logos appears when you Explore.That said, if there’s a Mechanical Turk that wants to take on that project to put the logos nicely, please email me wmougayar AT gmail.

    2. Teren Botham

      Very well done, William. Not James Harden, but you will be my MVP for the season.QQ: What does a blockchain mean ?

      1. Teren Botham

        never mind, will. i was able to figure it out

    3. fredwilson

      What a disaster of a morning it’s been. Finally on the ground in the Bay Area two hours after I should have been

      1. William Mougayar

        Good thing your Launch sessions are tomorrow morning. Will this be the first time you and Joanne are on the same stage, back to back? Looking forward to it.

        1. Richard

          Livecast?

      2. Seth Godin

        the same pilot no-show happened to me two weeks ago. They lied and lied and lied at American, so no one, including me, could switch to a flight that would work.Are you and I the only people who have had this happen? I’m surprised it doesn’t happen all the time, given how tightly everything is scheduled. When just one person is drunk or ill or whatever, the entire thing falls apart.Not venting, but truly curious. Is this a growing airline problem?

        1. LE

          I’m surprised it doesn’t happen all the time, given how tightly everything is scheduled. When just one person is drunk or ill or whatever, the entire thing falls apart.You have a system where the mass of people buy air travel based on price and schedule. And there are not enough people that are willing to pay more (or able to) to build in the type of redundancy which would allow for the entire thing not to fall apart.Separately, with things like this I say “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” I had a similar situation happen recently. I ran over to another airline and booked a flight not wanting to wait to find out the truth. Shoot first, ask questions later. See attached, two $125 vouchers for sending an email basically. After the credit from US Air I think maybe I lost less than $80 per seat to get home when I wanted to.A similar situation happened once with a rental car company (on an island). They only had one rental car and it was in bad shape. “Take it or leave it”. So I took that car (on a week rental) and then brought it back the very next day after I had secured another car that was in good shape. And easily got out of paying for the balance of the week.Click image to enlarge.

        2. David Semeria

          In Europe we’re told Americans are encouraged to vent — like a pressure valve, the steam is released; equilibriums are restored. It’s now big over here, too.Did I miss a memo? Should I stop venting? After years of non- venting (British upbringing) I was getting to like it.I’m confused now (that’s not a vent)

    4. Rick

      Nice map..Had more hacker problems. I’m gonna’ have to wipe all my machines. I’ve had enough of this crap over the past few years. I’m done. I’m going minimum internet usage so won’t be here at AVC anymore. First I had to stop with email then IM. It just doesn’t stop..I just didn’t want you to think it was because we had an misunderstanding. Have fun all… I’m done.

  3. LE

    William – Looks like a tremendous amount of work went into that!

    1. William Mougayar

      you can say that again 🙂 about a month elapsed time. I needed to check all of them one by one, myself.

  4. LE

    William would be interesting to use this data that you have compiled to calculate economic benefit spinoffs in this industry. For example I have earned thousands from a few companies that are on your list by providing services (as I’m sure many others have). However since it’s not the only thing that I do obviously I wouldn’t be on this list.What makes a company part of the blockchain ecosystem? (They say that they are?) Is a store that sells only pick axes to miners that much different than a store that sells pick axes but also windows and doors as well?

    1. William Mougayar

      I have avoided traditional companies that “use” bitcoin or the blockchain for a small part of their business. A rule of thumb was that if bitcoin or the blockchain or cryptographic-based technologies were to go away, these companies would be gone. So, there is a degree of purity in this.

  5. karen_e

    William, this is an excellent study guide for anyone who’d want to dabble in this field and then be able to sound somewhat intelligent. Can I call myself a broad thinker if I grok this one? 🙂

    1. William Mougayar

      yup..the idea is to learn from it 😉

  6. pointsnfigures

    This is excellent. Eventually the Bitcoin ecosystem will get so big you won’t be able to map it.

  7. Seth M Phillips

    Thanks for putting this together. Would you be willing just to crowd-source the company names and links on the silk page? That’d be easier to keep updated.

    1. William Mougayar

      Someone else asked for that feature (and Silk is working on it, where I get to approve suggested changes). I won’t totally crowd-source it because you lose curation quality, but any suggestions are welcome. Feel free to email me or post a comment on the blog post, please. Thank you.

  8. showmyhomework

    This is excellent William/Fred. The only thing missing is education. I wonder what we can do in this space through the blockchain / bitcoin. Super interesting…

  9. Ryan Walker

    Nice graphic, will have to digest it all this evening – enjoy the bits!

  10. James Ferguson @kWIQly

    @fredwilson Was in Brussels today for a working group meeting with people coming from all over Europe (a couple from the US too) Brussels Taxi drivers decided it was a perfect day for a strike (unannounced). One speaker arrives for 10:00 kick-off at 16:30 and has to leave by 17:00.Probably makes you feel no better but ….If EVER there was an argument for a disruptive taxicab service with market pricing models today was it.(Hey I feel better for my personal vent)

    1. Wim

      Ironically, those taxi drivers were exactly protesting against those disruptive taxicab services. This only proves your point of course, but it will take time (and more strikes) to liberate that market.BTW the action was announced. Sorry to hear the organizers missed that.

      1. James Ferguson @kWIQly

        Wim,Prior to this I had some sympathy for those who provided good reliable services at a high price.They lost my vote and all credibility – May the market win – it will.Any work force who believes strikes will slow disruptive market change are fooling themselves

  11. Tom Labus

    Most impressive. What’s the next step in that evolution @wmoug:disqus

    1. William Mougayar

      Maybe adding more data pieces like funding, country. Someone is re-doing the graph more professionally on photoshop. Actually & added it to Product Hunt today, if any one is inclined to vote it up.http://www.producthunt.com/…thanks!

  12. Pablo Yabo

    Some other markets which require to make public some information to prove ownership or timestamp of something could be in this graphic. We could use in the future a block chain to register an idea or to register the ownership of a good or real state. With contracts we could register each loan payment in a block chain and get the ownership after all the payments are there. There will be much more fields to add if we think of block chain technologies instead of just Bitcoin.