Leading consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, together with Outlier Ventures – a Europe-based dedicated blockchain venture builder, has evaluated the blockchain ecosystem and mapped 130 major blockchain startups into their key activity areas.

For this purpose, Outlier Ventures' Blockchain Ecosystem Tracker was used, which currently lists over 1200 blockchain startups. Launched in May 2016, the objective of the ecosystem is to be the go-to resource for investors who easily want to gain investor visibility and those who are active in the blockchain space and entrepreneurs.

“We are still at the beginning of a long journey for blockchain startups. Investment in 2016 reached an all-time high of over $500 million, bringing total investment in blockchain technology startups to $1.5 billion,” said Vijay Michalik, Digital Transformation Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “While the technology’s ecosystem is still in its early phases, 2016 saw a clear progression away from cryptocurrency towards generalized financial services and enterprise infrastructure. The technology is also making new inroads into vertical industries like energy, healthcare and the automotive sector.”

According to the startup map, the companies have been classified into 19 categories: Blockchain Consulting/App Dev; Payments; Identity & Reputation; Governance & Transparency; Mining; Exchange, Trading & Investing; Media; Legal, Audit & Tax; Content Management; Data Analytics, compliance & Security; Social Network; Wallet; Data Provenance & Notary; Supply Chain & Logistics; Prediction Markets; Public Chain Infrastructure; Commerce & Advertising; Financial Services Infrastructure; and Enterprise Infrastructure.

“Blockchains and distributed ledger technologies have seen high levels of interest and exploration from corporates in 2016. As the hype calms down, the next year should see real-world commercial deployments in specific value-add applications”, Lawrence Lundy, Head of Research & Partnerships at Outlier Ventures said.