Why smart contracts and blockchains are coming sooner than you think

For centuries, massive, critical components of our global economy have been organized around legacy infrastructure. Vastly important industries, like government and finance, continue to stagnate behind the capabilities of modern technologies, a demonstration of how complex and regulated systems breed inefficiency.

Enterblockchain, an adaptable technology that, if implemented by entrepreneurs and industry leaders effectively, can solve for some of our most fundamental challenges that we face as a species. At scale, we can leverage blockchain to optimize industries and empower a globally accessible economy.

Blockchains, at a high level, operate as public, immutable ledgers that can be programmed to automatically collect and store information. You can effectively store any type of data, so long as you can map it back to a key/pair value in the network. All of this information is encrypted and validated such that no single entity could corrupt/manipulate the system in their favor. The ledger distributes the computing power across all of the nodes in the network, mitigating the threat of hacking as there is no “central point to attack.”

Usingsmart contracts, another substantial element that can be utilized in a blockchain system, you can set up functions to automatically verify and, thus, authenticate for problems of trust and access. This replaces the need for middlemen, as all of the issues of verification, that are currently left to error-prone intermediary parties, can be entrusted into an algorithm that runs without fault. This re-ordering of the system has many tangible benefits for a number of different industries who currently rely on brokerage services to handle their transactions. With blockchain, we can not only make industries more efficient, but also more reliable, as we are eradicating the risk of human error.

While there is clearly alucrative opportunityto find valuable and clever ways to integrate this technology into some of the world’s most friction-full industries, we are still at the very beginning of this movement. As a result, we have seen very few successful (and realistic) implementations that could actually be operated efficiently at scale. There are, however, a few needles in the growing haystack that seem promising.