By the Numbers: Who’s Investing in Blockchain?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 6:16PM EDT · Published Jun 18, 7:15AM EDT

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By the Numbers: Who’s Investing in Blockchain? — © nadia_bormotova / iStock

By Doug Clinton of Loup Ventures

As part of our work on security tokens, we did an analysis to see how major companies are investing in the general blockchain space. The analysis consisted of a search on LinkedIn for how many individuals had listed “Blockchain” or “Cryptocurrency” in either their job title or description of work, whether in their current job or a previous job, across the top 247 S&P 500 companies. While these numbers may not be perfect representations of efforts that companies are making in these fields, as not all employees are on LinkedIn and some projects may be in stealth mode, the data paints a directional picture of efforts being made.

The results tell us that blockchain is still viewed as early a technology in its early days at the world’s largest companies. In the 247 companies that we looked at, we found 928 employees related to “blockchain” and 36 employees related to “cryptocurrency.”

Leading the charge by a wide margin is IBM, with 694 blockchain-related employees. While this number seems high compared to other companies, IBM has over 500,000 employees on LinkedIn. In other words, just over 0.1% of IBM’s employees are focused on blockchain technology. Additionally, IBM has arguably made the biggest push to sell blockchain products of any company and some of the employees in the study may be related to sales and operations, not purely engineers.

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Another very high-level takeaway is that it appears Amazon is exploring cryptocurrency, perhaps more than most of its peers. This too makes sense given the importance of payment mechanisms to Amazon’s business.

Here are the results of the top 10 companies:

While the raw numbers of blockchain employees at major companies are lower than we would have expected, it’s clear that the world’s biggest companies are at least exploring the technology. We expect that exploration to grow over the next several years.

Disclaimer: We actively write about the themes in which we invest: virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics. From time to time, we will write about companies that are in our portfolio. Content on this site including opinions on specific themes in technology, market estimates, and estimates and commentary regarding publicly traded or private companies is not intended for use in making investment decisions. We hold no obligation to update any of our projections. We express no warranties about any estimates or opinions we make.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.