Enterprise blockchain has changed fast. For years, private and permissioned networks looked like the safe bet. They offered control, familiar governance, and a structure enterprises thought they could trust.
Now that logic is shifting.
In CoinsPaid Media’s interview with Clare Adelgren, Interim Global Blockchain Leader at EY, one theme came through again and again: enterprises didn’t move toward public blockchains because of hype. They moved because closed systems often removed the very benefits blockchain was supposed to deliver. Privacy became the real unlock. Tokenization became useful only when it solved real business problems. And adoption started to look less like “crypto entering the enterprise” and more like infrastructure evolving for business use. That shift is part of the broader institutionalization of digital assets.
Why Enterprises are Moving from Private Blockchains to Public Infrastructure
First of all, congratulations on your new role. We’re excited to see what’s coming!
To start with, the market itself: for years, enterprises were experimenting with private and permissioned blockchains. What finally pushed many of them toward public blockchains?
It’s a great question. For a long time, private blockchains felt safer because they looked more familiar. Controlled access, known participants, governance — all of that mirrored existing systems.
Over time, enterprises learned that by closing the network, they were also stripping away one of the principal values of blockchain: decentralization and a shared truth.
So what pushed them toward public blockchains is the realization that the real business value of blockchain only emerges when multiple organizations can transact on a common, neutral infrastructure.
Private blockchains, ironically, remove the very properties that make blockchain economically interesting in and of itself.
From the enterprise side, a lot of organizations seemed to think the blocker was control or risk, and that building a closed environment would solve that. What assumptions turned out to be wrong?
Yeah, I do think there’s truth in what you say.
The biggest mistaken assumption was that having control automatically equals lower risk. But the reality is that closed environments actually concentrate risk. They’re concentrating operational risk, governance risk, and technical risk back inside the organization.
Very quickly, enterprises discovered that if you are running, building, and governing the network yourself, then you’re responsible for everything. You’re responsible for uptime, security, upgrades, and dispute resolution.
Public blockchains distribute that responsibility across a global network, and that network has been hardened by real-world usage at scale.
So ironically, what initially felt less risky turned out to be more risky, while public blockchain infrastructure is actually more resilient. Control just felt safer, but really, it was concentration rather than reduction.
From what you’ve seen at EY, what made public blockchains more acceptable inside organizations that used to reject them?
Two things happened.
First, public blockchains matured technically and operationally to the point where enterprises could start to think of using them as infrastructure.
But the second piece that changed, and perhaps more importantly in the enterprise context, is that privacy stopped being an afterthought.
Once enterprises can run sensitive transactions on a public shared blockchain without compromising or exposing confidential business data, the conversation changes completely.
Public blockchains went from being seen as too open to being recognized as the only way to create shared systems across companies without a single party being in control. They changed when privacy stopped being a workaround and became a feature.
Why Privacy Became the Real Unlock for Enterprise Blockchain
Enterprises often say scalability is the blocker when it comes to integrating blockchain into existing systems. But you’ve argued that privacy mattered more. Why was that the real issue?
I think scalability was always a visible risk and issue for enterprises, in the same way that it is something enterprises look for in any new technology.
But confidentiality was actually the real blocker for enterprises in this space. That’s because they simply can’t do large-scale payments or commercial transactions without it.
Businesses don’t need anonymity. What they need is confidentiality. They need to protect their pricing, their counterparties, their volumes, and their contractual terms.
Without that, no amount of throughput matters. If you don’t have confidentiality, then the rest doesn’t really solve the business problem.
Once it could be enforced at the protocol level on public blockchains, scalability became something you could plan for. Which is still there, of course, but adoption couldn’t really happen before confidentiality started to be included as an integral part of the protocol.
They never rejected blockchain because it was slow. They rejected it because it was too transparent.
What kinds of enterprise use cases became viable once privacy could be handled at the protocol level?
Payments are a clear example.
Large-scale on-chain payments between enterprises simply aren’t viable if every transaction exposes commercial relationships to the world, right?
So, payments, yes — but beyond payments, automated contract settlement, internal treasury movements, and complex supply chain coordination also only work once confidentiality is built into the technology.
Privacy has to be native. That’s exactly what open-source technologies like Nightfall and Starlight are designed to enable.
It needs to be in the protocol itself. Otherwise, the system isn’t going to scale, because a fundamental feature just isn’t there.
A lot of companies are still comparing something they don’t fully understand yet with systems they already know very well. So when they evaluate blockchain-based payment rails, how do they actually make that comparison?
I think if we take the example of blockchain-based payment rails, when they evaluate it, they’re going to start with the use case. And if they’re thinking about payments, they’re really going to look at three things: speed, cost, and control over the execution of the payment.
Then they do a comparison. They compare it with traditional systems, which are often fragmented, time-bound, and layered with a lot of intermediaries. There can be a lot of steps involved in a payment.
When they compare that with blockchain rails and blockchain infrastructure, they see the possibility of near-instant settlement, continuous 24/7 operation, and programmable logic.
So what you’re doing is bringing it back to a very practical question: what am I getting from this as infrastructure? What does this deliver to me? What value does it add to my organization and my payment process that I can’t get from what I already have today?
And what matters in all of that is confidentiality. It’s almost table stakes. You need that. If you’re taking the use case seriously, it becomes one of the basic criteria.
Where Tokenization is Delivering Real Enterprise Value
Tokenization survived the hype cycle, but not in the way many expected. Where do you still see it delivering value today?
The way I see it, tokenization delivers value when it removes friction from a real business process, not simply where it repackages assets.
Another way to think about it is that tokenized representations of assets are often valuable when they need to be moved, settled, or tracked between organizations.
Maybe that’s financial instruments. Maybe it’s supply chain assets. Maybe it’s sustainability data.
But tokenization works when it simplifies coordination and automation, not when it’s just a marketing exercise. It works when it removes friction, not when it adds novelty.
Are there particular industries where this is more applicable — real estate, healthcare, payments?
I would say across the board, very simply because, as I said, one of the primary use cases that people understand most easily is payments.
And there isn’t an industry that operates without payments.
What’s the biggest mismatch between how tokenization is marketed and how enterprises actually evaluate it?
I do think tokenization is often marketed as a transformation in and of itself. But enterprises don’t view it that way.
They evaluate it like they would evaluate any other infrastructure decision. They’re looking at it and asking: Does it reduce cost? Does it improve speed? Does it lower the risk?
If tokenization doesn’t change how a transaction executes or settles, it’s not compelling.
Enterprises are very pragmatic, and they care about outcomes. They’re not as interested in labels like tokenization or some of the names around it. They want better outcomes.
What Enterprises Kept from Crypto — and What Comes Next
After years of crypto exposure, what ideas did enterprises decide to keep, and what did they leave behind? What still slows adoption today?
Here’s the thing: I do believe enterprises are adopting infrastructure as opposed to crypto.
What they’ve learned over the years is that crypto was one of the first use cases. But now that enterprises are really moving into adoption, what we see happening is that they’ve kept the ideas that contributed to solving real problems.
That means shared ledgers, automated execution, and tokenized representations of value, which have a fundamental benefit to them.
What they’ve left behind are the aspects of crypto that don’t map to their business reality or business strategy — volatility, speculation, and some governance models. So they basically looked at it and said: What is it in this infrastructure that we can use as a core part of our business?
And I think that’s the way they’re thinking about it. That’s why adoption is where it is, and why we’ve seen this lean-in from both institutions and enterprises at this stage. It’s a combination of maturity, but also of picking and choosing what matters to them.
Also, it’s fair to acknowledge what slows that down. Even if it’s clear that they’re evaluating blockchain as infrastructure that can improve business outcomes, there is still integration and change management that have to happen.
What slows adoption now is the integration, the change management, and what you need to do to operationalize it properly. Most organizations can now accept that blockchain is going to be part of their future. The question is, how do we operationalize it responsibly and efficiently?
That’s really where they’re at. They’re thinking about it in a much more holistic way — how to integrate it into risk frameworks, security models, business processes, and ultimately how to translate it into value for customers.
If we look at enterprise blockchain adoption today, how much of it is still crypto-inspired, and how much of it is already something fundamentally different?
I don’t think we’re going to rewrite the first 10 or 15 years of how we got to where we are today. The way I would phrase it is that it’s crypto-inspired in its architecture, but fundamentally driven by enterprise purpose.
Enterprises aren’t trying to recreate a crypto market inside their business. They’re trying to modernize how business transactions work. Public blockchains are providing the foundation because, as we talked about, it’s about being able to capture the benefits of decentralized systems.
But for enterprise adoption, it’s really about privacy, compliance, operational efficiency, and how you combine all of those together to transform the way you transact. It’s the combination of those things that turns blockchain from an experiment into infrastructure that’s going to run your business.
So, enterprise blockchain isn’t so much about crypto adoption. It’s infrastructure evolution.
Do you think blockchain and crypto should be more differentiated today?
I think that’s partly just a maturing of how people understand the terminology.
For so many years, because cryptocurrency was the only visible use case, people interpreted it as cryptocurrency equals technology. And it’s not. It’s a use case.
What we’re seeing now is the rise of the actual infrastructure and the actual technology. So it’s really exciting. It’s actually a very exciting moment because it reflects maturity.
And I think anyone who has been in technology for a long time sees the same patterns in other infrastructure platforms.
You can really see the separation now. You still see volatility in cryptocurrency because it is a currency market. And then you see this steady buildout of implementations around stablecoins, which follows a very different pattern.
You can actually see that these are two very different markets.
Closing thoughts
What stands out in Adelgren’s view is that enterprise blockchain adoption has become much more selective and much more practical. Enterprises are not trying to import crypto culture into their organizations. They’re looking for infrastructure that improves how business gets done. And for that to happen, public blockchains need to offer privacy, resilience, operational value, and a clear reason to outperform existing systems.
The result is a much more mature conversation than the market had a few years ago. Less hype. More infrastructure. Less fascination with labels. More focus on whether blockchain can actually support payments, settlement, coordination, and enterprise-scale execution in the real world.
