Enterprise blockchain is going to come back from the dead

Opinion by Paul Brody, founder and chief executive, Nightfall Networks

Do you remember Pets.com? It raised $110 million from Amazon and others to build a business where people ordered pet toys and dog food online.

The company crashed and burned, and everyone learned an important lesson: you can’t profitably ship a 50-pound bag of dog food to a customer’s door.

As online retail entrepreneur Ed Baum asked in a 2001 postmortem: “Did Pets.com’s business plan assume the invention of transporters to magically move bags of pet food without shipping costs?”

Please, whatever you do, don’t share this with the people at Chewy; they might not realize their business model doesn’t work. Chewy reported $12.6 billion in sales and $223 million in net income in its latest fiscal year.

The real lesson of Pets.com wasn’t that shipping dog food was a bad idea. It’s that the idea arrived before the logistics, customer habits and unit economics required to make it work.

As it was with chew toys and dog food, so it may be with enterprise blockchains.

Collectively, the crypto industry probably incinerated just as much money trying that between 2017 and 2023 as Pets.com. Maybe more. But the dozens of companies that went after enterprise blockchain were not delusional; they were just too early.