Consulting firm Deloitte has cited five fundamental areas of development for blockchain technology that could help it attain achieve mainstream adoption.

This is according to a study published just recently.

Deloitte indicated that in order to be accepted by businesses on a mass scale, blockchain technology should hurdle five primary obstacles, which are the possibility of time-consuming operations, lack of standardization, high costs and complexity blockchain applications, regulatory uncertainty, as well as the absence of collaboration between blockchain-related firms.

In identifying the area that needs the most work, Deloitte named the problem of potential operational delays on a distributed ledger network. The firm stressed that slow transaction speed is one of the chief reasons for many players to avoid pondering whether blockchain is a technology that can be applied in “large-scale applications.”

Another huge obstacle for blockchain is lack of standardization. Deloitte pointed out that the lack of standardization keeps technology disruptors from interacting with each other. Deloitte harped on the fact that there are over 6,500 active blockchain projects on GitHub, with most of them founded on different protocols, consensuses, privacy measures, as well as written in various coding languages.

Among the remaining areas for development, Deloitte claimed that the necessity to lessen both costs and complexity of network operations, the significance of innovation-supporting regulation, as well as the critical role of partnerships between blockchain-related firms.

In terms of costs and complexity of the nascent technology, Deloitte pointed to well-known technology giants such as Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft that have reportedly delivered less complicated applications of blockchain with the use of cloud technology, as well as having contributed to augmenting the costs of operations on blockchain.

Among the most complicated issues around blockchain regulation, the company stressed the challenge of regulating smart contracts, which do not fit into current frameworks.

The report’s final point emphasized on the importance of cooperation between blockchain-related firms to advance the new deployments of the technology, as well as to deliver better information with regards to the space. The firm says the increasing number of blockchain consortia, such as R3, is a “bullish sign,” because the “value of a blockchain network increases with the number of users.”