Consortiums. Alliances. A blockchain development campus, whatever that is.

The rise of blockchain technology has led to a rush of industry executives wanting to capitalise on the hype - to be seen to be doing something, anything, with “the” blockchain.

And what happened?

Blockchains were marketed as an “absolute gamechanger” by the media and/or industry (delete as applicable), the wrong use cases were identified and people grew to think of the technology as a “silver bullet” solution to every problem faced by financial institutions today.

So it was almost inevitable that the bubble would burst at some point. It was announced this week that key members of the R3 blockchain consortium have now left the project - for reasons unknown.

It’s hard enough to get one company to agree to something, let alone the entire financial world. Was it reasonable to think every bank and regulatory body would agree on one model for handling transactions on a distributed ledger?

Perhaps not.

But these companies do have stuff in common. They’re all in fierce competition with each other, all highly-regulated and all dealing with the same problem - making things work together.

The problem is banks already have to deal with gigantically complex legacy systems which handle billions of dollars a day. It is a pipedream to imagine that a single approach to resolving all that complexity could arise overnight.

What the industry really needs to decide on is to what to extent it should collaborate or compete with their private blockchains - and whether there will be one model, or many.

There are many applications of blockchain, including tamper-proof audit, public asset provenance, smart contract definition and so on. It should be obvious that a single solution serving every major bank around the world, although nice to have, is just not realistic.

As in so many things, we need to embrace diversity. We must strive for practicality, simplicity and ease of integration when building financial solutions of all kinds that use the many different applications of blockchain technology.