Lei Chen, the CEO of Xunlei Technology, a digital services platform that branched into the crypto industry in 2017, recently said that in the future, we may see blockchain-related firms that have market capitalizations of over $30 billion.

However, Chen also noted this won’t be an easy thing to happen:

For this to happen, three things must occur first. [The first being that,] I believe there must be a blockchain architecture that can sustain one-million transactions per second and can have a response time within seconds.

Xunlei’s Platfrom

Chen, a University of Texas at Austin postgraduate, claims that Xunlei’s blockchain-based platform, ThunderChain – introduced in April of 2018 – can handle the processing load required to deploy applications that need to execute millions of transactions.

Clearly, a decentralized (or centralized) network would need to have a very high computation capacity to be able to conduct transactions that fast. Chen claims that his firm, Xunlei Technology, has managed to accumulate the bandwidth required to operate a network of this scale – as it has reportedly leased unutilized computing power from a large number of PCs.

Jennifer Zhu Scott, founding principal at Radian Partners and a member of World Economic Forum’s Blockchain Council, said that the type of distributed processing model described by Chen has already been deployed in other tech industries, including gaming platforms.

Gaming Industry May Be Disrupted

Many blockchain advocates think that the traditional gaming industry will increasingly move towards building new software on blockchain-enabled platforms. Although current distributed ledger technology-based systems may not be able to handle the large amount of data used by online games, there does seem to be some progress in this area.

Since CryptoKitties clogged the Ethereum network last year, there have been a number of new games launched on other decentralized platforms such TRONbet. As CryptoGlobe reported in mid-October, TRONbet is the first gaming dApp to be launched on the Tron (TRX) blockchain and it was played over 10,000 on the first day of its launch.

Going on to comment about different use cases for blockchain technology, Chen believes the concept of data ownership may also change: 

Blockchain will challenge the data ownership models of today, because data should be of the people for the people by the people. I think ten years down the road, we’re going to see user data in the same way as intellectual property.

Regulatory Challenges

However, the entrepreneur acknowledged that there will be regulatory challenges ahead – as the laws governing what constitutes data ownership (for individuals and companies) would have to be changed. This, according to Chen, is the second thing that is required to build scalable blockchain-enabled applications.

He explained:

There needs to be one, somewhat unified, well thought-out regulation framework that is developed proactively, not reactively.

The third thing that would need to happen for blockchain tech to succeed is that platforms would have to have at least 10 million active users (each), Chen noted. He remarked:

If there is a ten-million user application of blockchain today, we would be seeing the entire technology in a completely different light.