You might have long suspected it, but now it’s official: Blockchain is overhyped while most of those enterprise projects you’ve probably heard about are just pilots.

That’s according to Gartner, who said the technologies that comprise Blockchain have at a least a decade to go before they reach the kind of maturity demanded by the enterprise for broader rollout. Gartner reckons it won’t be until 2028 that Blockchain becomes “fully scalable and technically operational.”

“Blockchain technologies have not lived up to the hype and most enterprise blockchain projects are stuck in experimental mode,” Gartner’s distinguished analyst and research vice president Avivah Litan said in a statement.

Blockchain party like it’s 2029

The announcement came as Gartner applied its famous hype cycle chart to Blockchain technologies as of 2019. Gartner’s hype cycle is a graph that the analyst has employed over the decades in an attempt to plot the maturity and adoption of different technologies and applications.

Blockchain is, according to Gartner, now sliding into the trough of disillusionment on that hype-cycle chart – just behind crypto mining and distributed ledgers. The trough of disillusionment is the era when interest in a new technology wanes as the experiments fail to deliver and when the providers of the technology in question also begin to shake out – leaving just the survivors.

Still shunting up the slope ahead of their plunge into Gartner’s great tough – expanses the analyst has branded as innovation trigger and peak of inflated expectations – are a whole train of enabling technologies. They include crypto currency wallets, smart contracts, decentralised identity and data security.

For Blockchain to become mainstream, Gartner reckons – rightly – users should not have to worry about needing to pick the “right” platform, language, system interfaces or consensus algorithms. Concerns about interoperability of different Blockchain platforms must also be solved.

The pronouncement follows a Gartner report in June that reckoned nearly all – 90 per cent, to be precise – of existing blockchain implementations would need to be replaced in two-years’ time. The reason? It’s the only way for those who’ve already dabbled to safely ensure that their implementations remain competitive, secure and avoid sliding into obsolescence.

Further, Gartner reckoned the Blockchain market remains fragmented with overlapping options making technology choices confusing for IT types.