After a couple of E&Y “reports” cast a deep shadow on their professional aptitude I naturally wanted to inspect the rest of “big four’s” state of “blockchain competency”. Next in line is KPMG.
There are actually only a few of their reports available for open download and I decided to go with the shortest (only 4 pages) and most recent one — “Blockchain for technology, media and telecom companies (TMT)” — dated somewhere to the midst 2019 (might be mistaken on that though).
On the first page it says: “Venture Capital investments in blockchain reached $2.85 billion in 2018” (their information source is a relatively unknown site named “Bitcoinist”). I wonder whether authors might confuse the total amount of all ICOs/STOs with actual VC investments to the space. The former were reported by other sources (such as PWC) to already overpass $3.3 billions during the first five months of 2019. However, the latter (according to “PitchBook”) is still lugging below $900 million.
It also says: “Worldwide spending on blockchain solution is forecast to reach $11.7 billion in 2022.” Sounds familiar, right? Again, KPMG has actually revealed its source. Yes, we’ve guessed it right — it’s the “International Data Corporation” (IDC) :) Same old report. I wish they all start to acknowledge that their only source of “professional expertise” is the first two pages of a Google search.
It goes further: “The business value added by blockchain will surpass $176 billion by 2025 and $3.1 trillion by 2030”. Source being Gartner, Inc “Practical Blockchain: A Gartner Trend Insight Report (March 2017)”. This report is not in an open access. However, I might say that anyone can call “business value added” whatever he/she wants without a risk of being contradicted. Additionally, it’s not exactly professionally sound to use somebody’s two years old forecast in 2019.
Now to the bright side of it. Citing: “The Open Music Initiatives” or OMI (founded by Berklee College and MIT Media Lab) seeks to simplify the administration of music rights and help make royalty payments more accurate. Step one was to create API that companies could incorporate into their systems to identify key data points”.
Basically, those people want to build a decentralized apple music store. Sounds cool, providing participants would voluntarily report on themselves using pirate records :)
Nonetheless, despite all glaring shortcomings of this work, I want to give KPMG authors some kudos for being transparent about their sources as well as for at least trying to provide some information to its readers (such as the short list of examples of how DLT can be used in TMT industry) and not spending too much of our time on getting through all of that.
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