Welcome
Gvili Tech welcomes Cognyte as we partner on an exciting blockchain analytics innovation journey. We congratulate Cognyte on recently becoming an independent public company, listing on NASDAQ, and ringing of the opening bell.
About Cognyte
Cognyte is a cybersecurity company and a global leader in security analytics software with a market capitalization nearing 2 billion USD at the time of writing. Its solutions are relied on by over 1,000 government enterprise customers in more than 100 countries. Cybersecurity is recognized as critical to the success of enterprises in the coming years.
Partnership
Gvili Tech partnered with Cognyte on a journey to smarter tech innovation in the world of blockchains and distributed ledgers, recognized as one of the important technology trends of the current decade. This world is fast-evolving; in 2016 the global blockchain ecosystem could be presented in one visualization and recently a similar visualization was put together for just one country, like Singapore, for example.
Challenges
The main challenges in the journey with Cognyte are the scale of the information that needs to be handled and the obstacles to analyzing it.
The world of blockchains and distributed ledgers is quite big. A single blockchain can take GBs worth of data. There are hundreds of them just for cryptocurrencies, in which they represent transactions by millions and millions of participants. Other blockchains include side-chains (a.k.a. layer 2 blockchains) and private blockchains, such as ones used for coordinating industry processes spanning multiple participants.
Blockchains are generally not easy to analyze. For security reasons, the information in these blockchains is obfuscated in various ways as a matter of norm, making it harder to analyze. In many public blockchains, the participants in a transaction are pseudonymous. Moreover, in some privacy-enhanced blockchains the details of the transaction are encrypted. Furthermore, some blockchain-based solutions move transactional data away from the blockchain’s network to side-networks.
The technology of blockchains and distributed ledgers is hard to keep up with. It is evolving rapidly both in the industry as well as in the academia. A number of industries have adopted blockchain technology and others are expected to be disrupted by it. In the academia, at least hundreds of papers have been published, according to one collection. All this makes the challenges increasingly harder over time.
Opportunities
The main opportunities in the journey with Cognyte are growth indicators of reference markets and the economies of scale inherent to the blockchain analytics market.
There are a couple of reference markets that may be considered. First, there is the cryptocurrency market, which provides strong growth indicators. The cryptocurrency market capitalization, mostly concentrated in bitcoin, has grown more than 5 times over in the past 12 months, approaching 1 trillion USD. The recent bitcoin trading volume is about 50 million USD. There are several major companies accepting bitcoin today. These and other indicators show a significant and growing market activity handled by blockchains that is of interest to blockchain analytics.
Second, there is the blockchain venture capital market. There are dozens of venture capital firms investing in blockchain, many of them are well-known traditional technology investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world’s largest venture funds. The total investment in blockchain amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars and is growing at an impressive pace. These and other statistics suggest that the pace of blockchain technology development will continue to be fast, and likely to accelerate, in the coming years.
Moreover, the blockchain analytics market is characterized by economies of scale. The larger the network of blockchain analytics customers the smarter it gets. This is not only due to the increased source coverage, which allows for a deeper analysis of the blockchain world, but also due to streamlining of customization, i.e., the effective reuse of technology across solutions built for different customers.