Solving Blockchain’s Real-World Enterprise Challenges with Institutional Adoption

By now, most organisations recognise the promises of blockchain technology: greater transparency, better traceability, near-instant settlement times, and freedom from costly intermediaries. Whether streamlining supply chains, enabling real-time cross-border payments, creating immutable audit trails, or tokenising real-world assets (RWAs), blockchain provides unprecedented efficiencies that both modern and legacy systems simply can’t compete with.

Despite this allure, practical obstacles often get in the way, forcing enterprises, financial institutions, and other organisations to stay away. Concerns around data privacy, regulations, and limited scalability add to the complexity of integrating blockchain into existing systems, creating additional friction. These hurdles make blockchain appear less like a transformative solution and more like a risky experiment, especially when key operations or regulatory compliance are on the line.

 

Data Privacy

 

Transparency is one of blockchain’s most prominent features, but for enterprises and institutions handling sensitive data, this creates a liability. Public chains display transaction data, including balances, for anyone to view. While private, or permissioned, chains offer a bit more privacy, they typically lack the nuanced access controls that enterprises need to thrive and meet customer expectations.

Financial institutions, HMOs, and supply chain operators can’t afford to risk a leak involving trade secrets, client data, or compliance-sensitive information. This is where blockchain’s immutability becomes a liability. A breach involving financial records, customer identities, or medical data will likely trigger major penalties, lawsuits, or even criminal charges. Beyond the legal implications, lost trust, reputational damage, and operational disruptions would derail any business.

One company working to solve this dilemma is Applied Blockchain, which just launched Silent Data, an Ethereum Layer-2 giving organisations a new way to run blockchain applications. The platform shields sensitive information and provides a collection of developer tools to enable any type of organisation to deploy blockchain-based applications with fully programmable privacy. It offers fine-grained control over what data is shared, with whom, and when, as well as control over who can host access to the ledger, enabling organisations to securely share data between one another and eliminating the threat of damaging leaks.

 

 

Scalability

 

Scalability represents another significant hurdle to enterprise blockchain adoption. Without the ability to expand operations, there’s no sense in integrating a new technology. A blockchain network is only as useful as its capacity to scale without sacrificing speed, cost, or operational effectiveness. Most blockchain systems were constructed with decentralisation and security at the forefront. While these architectures laid the foundation for crypto’s decentralised ethos, they did so at the cost of performance, resulting in significant bottlenecks.

Bitcoin, for example, processes an average of seven transactions per second (TPS), while traditional payment networks like Visa can process over 24,000 TPS at peak capacity. This gap becomes especially problematic when a network faces congestion, creating scenarios where slower confirmation times and rising transaction costs undermine usability. For sectors like finance or e-commerce operating in high-traffic areas, these constraints can become significant business roadblocks. A delay in a transaction can result in failed trades, missed opportunities, and substantial financial losses.

Beyond data privacy, infrastructure limitations are also being addressed by emerging platforms focused on performance at scale. Lava Network is one such company that built a decentralised platform to optimise blockchain data accessibility through its open, decentralised RPC (Remote Procedure Call) model and API marketplace. By aggregating a network of RPC providers into a unified network, Lava acts as a permissionless marketplace, connecting dApps, developers, AI agents, and enterprises with high-quality providers across any chain, at any time, curbing delays and interruptions. Its architecture is designed to eliminate infrastructure limitations and complexities, allowing enterprise clients to scale efficiency while maintaining high levels of service.

This solution offers a clear and reliable path for blockchain ecosystems, meeting the demands of real-world applications.

 

Regulations

 

No entity wants to make a major infrastructure bet only to find out it does not align with existing or pending regulations. While the global regulatory landscape for blockchains becomes less fragmented, barriers remain. Enterprises are worried about how data sovereignty legislations and financial compliance requirements fit in with the rapid expansion of decentralised technologies.

James Wo, CEO and Founder of DFG, the global blockchain and cryptocurrency investment firm, believes regulatory clarity in the US is already “shifting institutional attitudes, as seen with the approval of BTC and ETH ETFs [exchange traded funds].” He pointed out that the GENIUS Act has eased regulatory barriers on DeFi platforms, which can lead to “broader adoption of both tokenisation and DeFi as they become more accessible and transparent with TradFi players.”

Wo also noted that institutions still have to contend with major fines and violations “involving unregistered securities and failure to implement proper KYC/AML controls” despite greater regulatory clarity that can “reduce these incidents.” Importantly, he added: “Institutions have already found compliant entry points into crypto, even before the regulatory environment began to improve.”

While growing regulatory clarity around digital assets in the US offers financial institutions a safer path toward adoption, it remains to be seen how other highly-regulated industries can adopt the technology. Questions like “who’s liable if a smart contract fails?” will need concrete answers. Until regulators catch up, or blockchains bake compliance into their core, enterprises will be hesitant to engage with blockchains in any format.