The UK has all the resources, as well as industrial and governmental will, to become a global hub for blockchain and the crypto economy by approximately 2022, according to a new report.

This year should mark the inflection point at which it will become clear if the UK has marshalled its existing resources across industry, government, academia and thought leadership to achieve this exciting opportunity.

Research from the Big Innovation Centre, DAG Global and Deep Knowledge Analytics identified and profiled 225 companies, 170 investors, 20 tech hubs and think tanks, 10 incubators and accelerators, and 100 individuals crucial to the UK blockchain industry – which it estimates to have made more than £500 million worth of investments in the last two years.

The work was done in coordination with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain, which was established in January 2018.

The government is currently in the process of investigating digital currencies and distributed ledger technology, with a Treasury Select Committee paper expected in the next few months. Meanwhile, the Bank of England and financial regulators are also looking into the risks and rewards offered by blockchain technologies.

“Blockchain has been recognized by the UK parliament as a very important and disruptive technology, and it has shown commitment to support the accelerated development of the digital economy via a variety of government initiatives,” commented Birgitte Andersen, chief executive of Big Innovation Centre. “We are still at the early stages of the blockchain industry’s development and the huge impact it undoubtedly will have in Britain and globally.”

Sean Kiernan, chief executive of DAG Global, stated that the UK is already a major financial hub and has become a FinTech leader as well, with all the potential to replicate that with blockchain technologies and the crypto economy.

“The gap between the two worlds of traditional finance and crypto economy remains, but in the coming years we can expect this to lessen and eventually disappear,” he added.

The groups behind the report plan to release new editions quarterly, expanding its coverage of industry occurrences and government initiatives.

“The UK has the highest probability of becoming an international leader of a synergistically-integrated digital economy and to foster the evolution of a new financial industry powered by AI more than any other country at this point,” commented Dmitry Kaminskiy, founder of Deep Knowledge Analytics.

“It is for this purpose that we applied significant efforts toward the systematized analysis of the blockchain industry and supported production of this first edition, which we will develop further to update the report each financial quarter, in order to best align with the industry's inflection point in coming years,” he added.

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