Enterprise blockchain adoption still sounds like a promise more than a reality. Big brands announce pilots, proofs of concept and partnerships, yet many projects never reach production.
In an interview with CCN, Rob Allen, Director of Hedera Enterprise Adoption Team (HEAT) at Hashgraph, explains how Hedera aims to close the gap between proofs of concept (PoC) and real deployments.
He breaks down why so many enterprise pilots stall before reaching production and clarifies where regulation and standards like ISO 20022 actually fit into that journey.
Allen argues that the technology already works. The real battle sits in enterprise politics, product-market fit, privacy constraints and a changing regulatory map.
Watch the full interview here:
Why Hedera Built Heat To Solve Enterprise Adoption Friction
Hedera created HEAT to attack a very specific problem: enterprises can run PoC, but they struggle to cross the “last mile” into production and scale.
“HEAT is a new initiative by the Hedera ecosystem, which seeks to address some of the challenges that we had previously seen in getting enterprise DLT (distributed ledger technology) solutions all the way into production,” Allen says.
Council members have already tested many ideas. Some pilots reached production, some reached “production scale,” but “generally they kind of peter out at the proof of concept stage,” he notes.
Allen points to the hard reality of enterprise delivery:
“Getting as far as a proof of concept is actually relatively easy, but getting that final mile moving from PoC to pilot to production and scale is the hard part because you’re not necessarily focusing on the functional requirements of the technology. You need to navigate, you know, enterprise departments, need executive sponsorship, need funding, so it needs to be in someone’s budget.”
HEAT as the Coordination Layer for Enterprise Projects on Hedera
Security reviews add more friction. Cybersecurity teams prioritize risk controls that innovation labs might skip during early experiments, which slows the handoff from labs to business units.
HEAT sits across the moving parts of the Hedera ecosystem.
Allen describes a landscape with a labs team in Hashgraph, a separate LLC for the council. This foundation handles grants, liquidity and integrations, and organizations such as the Swiss Hashgraph Association. All of them touch enterprise work. HEAT offers coordination without control.
“What I do with my team is provide a kind of professional service to our council members,” he says. That includes architecture validation, design reviews, partner selection and support with “their own internal stakeholders.”
Why Enterprise Pilots on Hedera Struggle To Reach Product-Market Fit
Allen does not see Hedera as the bottleneck. “Hedera is ready and it has been ready,” he says, and points to real deployments with companies like Mondelez and abrdn.
He highlights Avery Dennison’s atma.io, a digital venture created by the company, “for a while drove thousands of transactions a second, which was far beyond any other blockchain technology’s ability to keep up.”
Atma.io still did not land a lasting product-market fit. Allen comes back to a classic startup principle: get a minimum viable product into users’ hands fast and learn from the feedback.
How the Final Mile Strengthens Enterprise Adoption on Hedera
Allen describes the “final mile” as the point where an enterprise pilot stops being a controlled experiment and starts proving whether it can survive in a real market.
Teams move from building a prototype to validating it with real users, which forces quick adjustments, new design choices and honest conversations about what actually works. He sees this stretch as the moment that decides if a project becomes a product.
He stresses that the final mile is about getting an minimum viable product (MVP) into users’ hands so teams can make the course corrections and the pivots needed to find real product-market fit.
Different council members bring different internal politics, geographies and sector realities. “There won’t be a one-size-fits-all approach here,” Allen says, which is why HEAT leans into tailored professional services and ongoing education.
Many enterprise decision makers, he notes, still hold “rather an old attitude towards blockchain,” while “AI has certainly kind of sucked a lot of the wind out of the sails of blockchain.”
Despite that, he remains “very, very optimistic” about categories where Hedera “not only excels” but “is streets ahead of the other blockchains’ ability to deliver,” mainly because of low fees, fast settlement and the lack of environmental impact in its consensus model.
How HashSphere Solves Enterprise Privacy and Hybrid Architecture Needs on Hedera
When enterprises attempt to deploy on Hedera, technical friction often arises around privacy and architecture, rather than basic throughput.
“Enterprises still have a duty of privacy over the data that’s being shared,” Allen says. Many use cases cannot run on a public network “because it’s in the clear.” Even with encryption, transaction flows remain visible.
Layer-2 solutions do not resolve the privacy and control concerns that regulated enterprises face. Allen explained that companies in heavily regulated sectors are uncomfortable with architectures where they cannot verify validator locations or understand how transactions move through the system.
As he put it, enterprises “absolutely need to know” where their data is processed, which makes them reluctant to rely on networks that introduce uncertainty at those layers.
Hedera’s answer is HashSphere, which Allen describes as “a private version of Hedera” that shares the same stack. Hedera’s code now sits in the Linux Foundation’s Decentralized Trust project, which allows open source developers to contribute.
Enterprise Privacy Challenges in DLT: Hedera’s Hybrid Model and HashSphere Explained
Hedera now operates across three layers: a fully open-source codebase, the Hedera public network governed by the council, and private instances of the same technology deployed inside enterprise environments. The challenge, Allen noted, is achieving seamless interoperability between these layers.
He pointed to Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s tokenization initiative, as a concrete example. Australian Payments Plus, a Hedera council member, built a private HashSphere network to host a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs) because regulators did not want the asset to sit on a public chain.
At the same time, Allen explained, “we operate today or are operating a token interchange, a stable coin interchange for members of our scheme,” where the stablecoins are backed by that CBDC.
This structure allows enterprises to start in private, get comfortable with the technology, then extend to public networks for use cases that demand openness. Allen contrasts this approach with earlier deployments on platforms like Hyperledger Fabric or IBM Blockchain that “built a walled garden.”
Hedera’s Four Enterprise Pillars: Stablecoins, Tokenization, ESG and AI Provenance
Hedera’s council includes about 32 major companies. Some critics worry that members could build solutions that only benefit their own operations. Allen does not argue for hard restrictions on that.
“It’s a public network and anyone should build on it in any way that they see fit,” he says. Instead, Hedera uses committees such as the Network Utilization Committee (USECOM) to share “architecture or use cases or best practice or lessons learned,” so members can avoid common mistakes.
HEAT adds another layer of discipline. One of its responsibilities is to conduct proper value assessments. Allen wants to “move beyond” PoC toward “real value, real value for the council member or the enterprise and real value for the Hedera network.”
He focuses on four main pillars where Hedera sees strong potential:
* Payments and stablecoins
* Real-world asset tokens and delivery-versus-payment (DvP)
* Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability
* AI provenance
“No other network even comes close to the investment and the outcomes that we’ve built around sustainability and ESG because we’re a carbon negative network,” Allen says.
HEAT plans to build new capabilities and products around these pillars, and value assessments will shape which projects receive grants or resources from the foundation or the Swiss Hashgraph Association.
ISO 20022, Hedera and the Real Role of Messaging Standards in Blockchain
Marketing narratives often describe blockchains as “ISO 20022-compliant” and tie that status to big deadlines in the banking world. Allen takes a more grounded view.
“I do think it’s overstated,” he says. He recalls “a time a year or two ago where there were all these ‘ISO 20022-compliant’ chains and there was a whole narrative around which ones were compliant and which ones were not.”
For Allen, ISO 20022 is “just a messaging line. It’s a messaging standard and a registry that enables payment networks or payment network participants to communicate in a standard way.”
A blockchain does not need “compliance” in a formal sense. It needs to carry ISO 20022 messages as payloads at the application layer, the same way it carries other structured data.
Hedera can benefit in that environment because enterprises know where its validators sit and can satisfy non-functional requirements.
Allen also notes that ISO 20022 already underpins systems such as Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) in Europe and Australia’s New Payments Platform. For DLT use cases, he expects the standard to matter “at that application level,” including at interfaces that connect stablecoins and CBDCs to traditional payment rails.
Stablecoins, Agentic AI and Regulatory Shifts: What Will Drive Hedera’s Next Adoption Wave
Looking ahead, Allen expects a visible jump in concrete adoption.
“I think we are going to be very surprised over the course of the next year that a true adoption happens,” he says. He tracks “50 or more use cases” that wait for “a regulatory-friendly environment to deploy into.”
He singles out “agentic commerce” and micropayments as a major theme, especially when paired with AI agents that need trusted data and cheap, granular payments. Accenture’s work with EQTY Labs, which builds firmware for Nvidia and Intel chips to address provenance, sits in that space. Allen expects that product “to be global.”
He also highlights intersections between Hedera’s four pillars, such as ESG systems that “start generating green bonds which can be tokenized and paid for in stablecoins.” Once enterprises learn how to operate stablecoins, he argues, they can reuse most of the stack for tokenized real world assets (RWA) or carbon credits.
Non-technical barriers still slow that shift. Enterprises need wallet infrastructure, back-end integrations, accounting treatment and jurisdiction-specific clarity. Allen expects those hurdles to clear “very soon.”
Regulation will not move at an even pace. He already sees “regulatory arbitrage happening between jurisdictions,” with progressive regulators in places like the UK, the EU, Singapore, Hong Kong and soon Australia, while others lag behind. Multinationals will need to navigate that split.
Allen believes those forces, together with competition and fear of missing out (FOMO), will push adoption forward. Once the first use cases cross the bridge from pilot to scaled deployment, he expects “the combination of all of these key pillars” to drive “a lot of very interesting change” on Hedera.
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