The World Economic Forum has been focusing on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for quite some time now. In a report released last year, entitled “Deep Shift: Technology Tipping Points and Societal Impact”, it discussed six megatrends, one of them being “The sharing economy and distributed trust” that included blockchain technology.

“The blockchain, an emerging technology, replaces the need for third-party institutions to provide trust for financial, contract and voting activities”, it said.

The survey results pointed out that the “tipping point” for Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology is expected to occur in 2027. 58% of respondents expected this tipping point, 10 percent of global GDP, stored on blockchain, to have occurred by 2025.

The WEF is now plans to start conducting trials of its own, CoinDesk reported. The Phase 1 of the project identified key disruptive innovations, built understanding of how they are interlinked and assessed their potential impact.

For the next phase, two major challenge areas related to innovation in financial services have been identified that will require multi-stakeholder collaboration to be addressed effectively, the WEF said. One of these challenge areas is “Applications of Distributed Ledger Technology” that will seek to understand potential use cases for distributed ledger technology (such as the blockchain) “within and between” financial institutions and identify key pre-conditions for the adoption of this technology.

The other challenge area relates to defining the role of financial institutions in the creation and operation of a global standard for digital identity.

The Forum said that it will strive to create actionable frameworks and use cases that industry players can leverage to forward their own initiatives in these areas.

The WEF will hold two distributed ledger workshops, the first in Australia on 07 April and the second in New York in May, 2016. These workshops will focus on discussion with fintechs, incumbent institutions and subject matter experts on use cases for DLT.