How blockchain is streamlining business operations
What would the landscape look like today if Marriott had discovered AirBnB? It’s always striking to see disruptions being made in industries where the most well-established brand “should have” been at the forefront of innovation, but wasn’t. AT&T could have created Skype and Discover could have created Paypal, but they didn’t. And where major brands are failing, blockchain is quickly stepping into the landscapes of industries ripe for disruption. Banking, advertising, exchanges, law, insurance, healthcare, energy, supply chain management, and government are all experiencing the introduction of innovative new technologies based on blockchain technology.
Blockchain has been a particularly disruptive force in the financial world, and especially in handling online transactions. The history of finance has generally been inefficient, centralized, and exclusionary, which makes it both very resistant to change and very vulnerable to bad actor parties. Blockchain might present a solution for this logjam.
Some companies are at the forefront of exploring how blockchain could revolutionize the financial world. Ontology is a blockchain for building and managing decentralized identity applications, creating a system that bridges the gap between real world and distributed digital data systems. Their network is compatible with existing blockchains, but also with traditional information systems–providing decentralized entity management, secure data storage, key management, and encrypted data analysis on any technological system.
How can blockchain be leveraged to change the world of business transactions? By disrupting two major elements of this ecosystem: trust systems and identity verification. Let’s take a look at each component.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology because of its ability to digitize, decentralize, secure and incentivize the validation of transactions. A wide swath of industries are evaluating blockchain to determine what strategic differentiators could exist for their businesses if they leverage blockchain and the secure amount of trust it brings with every financial transaction.
When looking to the future to examine how blockchain could change digital transactions, it’s important to remember what made online sales feasible in the first place. Retailers and transaction processors created a series of safeguards to ensure that buyers and sellers were both protected. You don’t worry too much about getting your credit card number stolen when you buy something online today, or about failing to receive the item you paid for. The reason buyers are more confident in their online purchases today versus ten years ago is because of trust.
But trust systems currently in place often don’t talk to each other, and the gaps between them create unsecured areas for scammers, hackers, or simple human error to exploit. Blockchain pioneers are working to create a transaction network without weak spaces between or inside trust networks. Because blockchain is immutable, universally accessible, and decentralized, it provides an ideal space for trust-based transactions.
