The next generation of Australia’s national lotteries could be based on blockchain technology, ‘Tabcorp’ has declared as the firm enters a growing roster of blue-chip companies hopping on the blockchain bandwagon.

Development teams within ‘Tabcorp’s Lotteries’ and ‘Keno division,’ including ‘TattsLotto’ and ‘Oz Lotto,’ have already started trialing the distributed-ledger technology, Managing Director and CEO David Attenborough said during a panel session at the recent ‘ACS Reimagination Thought Leaders’ Summit conference.’

The progress is part of the company’s ongoing efforts at continuous development – which in current years has seen it restoring its core technology and supporting a digital lotteries business that rose 73% last year and produced twice as much income as its retail business.

“Most of our investment is incremental, and we have set up customer-led Agile teams to do customer-facing digital products, and to try to move the dial on an almost two-weekly basis,” Attenborough revealed in highlighting the “bigger-horizon stuff” that Tabcorp has on its strategic radar.

“We are always watching and looking to be aware of disruptors that may come in,” he said. “You’ve got to be continually looking, and we’ve just got to get better and better.”

While the change to blockchain-based lotteries may be some time off, the technology’s influence on the strategic radar of a company with $5.5b in yearly revenues depicts another dent in the belt of a technology that has progressed swiftly to drop its association with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

The distributed-ledger technology would give a non-repudiable journal of lottery transactions, helping Tabcorp’s core value of Integrity as it maintains its push into digital products.

Other grand projects helped the technology gain vital momentum this year, emerging from niche experiments around the Scotch fillet, almonds, and medicinal cannabis into a driver for end-to-end supply chain visibility.

Early trials of the technology were mostly empirical, and pundits have cautioned that it will take some time for the technology to avoid the ‘hole of disillusionment,’ with the ACS’ recent Blockchain 2030 report noting eight critical situations that will push its adoption here.

Those situations are rapidly being explored as new contributions provide more effortless access to blockchain infrastructure. Nestlé has lately leveraged Amazon Managed Blockchain to create Chain of Origin, a blockchain-based tool for tracing coffee provenance from the location where the bean is picked to the place where it’s loved into the consumer’s cup.

“Consumers want to know more in terms of where their product is coming from,” said Armin Nehzat, digital delivery head with Nestlé Oceania.

“The challenge for us is that we can go one level into the supply chain and talk to our brokers or our buyers, but it is very, very hard to see multiple layers in because it takes a long time for this information to become available.”

Amazon Managed Blockchain is one of various blockchain as a service (BaaS) offerings that are making blockchain-based supply chain tools, decentralized applications, and smart contracts much more convenient.

The technology’s slow-burn in enterprises is expanding, with new adopters such as FlashFX marshaling blockchain-based systems and business-critical organizations like the ASX chatting up its commitment as a next-generation trading system.

Significant consulting firms are also getting in on the action, with Accenture lately opening an Innovation Hub in Perth that will give businesses way to expertise in business process, blockchain, and other technologies.

Yet the technology’s continued development generates its issues for businesses: despite enterprises’ growing enthusiasm, Gartner noted, by 2021, 9/10 contemporary blockchain implementations will need to be displaced due to market obsolescence and market fragmentation.

“Many CIOs overestimate the capabilities and short-term benefits of blockchain as a technology to help them achieve their business goals,” Gartner senior research director Adrian Lee said, “thus creating unrealistic expectations when assessing offerings from blockchain platform vendors and service providers.”