These 6 Industries Are Using Blockchain to Gain a Competitive Advantage
Real estate. Law firms. Information services. Banking: Where else will this technology raise its profile?
While people debate the benefits and pitfalls of cryptocurrency, the blockchain technology that underlies these currencies is taking the main stage.
That’s understandable, as blockchain is a must-have in and of itself for creating competitive advantage.
For some companies, blockchain-based security applications are enticing; others are simply excited about blockchain‘s potential for helping them create transparent marketplaces for their customers.
Whatever the motive, the immutable and transparent nature of the blockchain is what has so many people racing to incorporate it into their IT strategies. Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum,interviewed by Newsweek explained why more and more companies are taking note: “There won’t ever be a single powerful entity that controls the system or controls gatekeeping into the system the way blockchain does,” Lubin said.
As a decentralized platform for innovation, blockchain technology, over time, will revolutionize virtually every industry. First movers will have the distinct advantage of figuring out how blockchain can get their business to the next level. They’ll also figure out earlier than their competition does the challenges that come with any new IT integration.
Following are examples of industries that are already adopting blockchain solutions with a great degree of success.
The challenges associated with fund administration are extensive. Currently, most companies rely on outdated software or ungainly paper processes. Gary Markham, CEO of aXpire a blockchain-based solution for expenditure management, described the traditional challenges in this company white paper. “Normally,” he wrote, “businesses have to spend a lot of time sorting through paper, PDFs and spreadsheets to process documents by hand.
“Smart contracts use software code to automate tasks, thereby shaving hours off a range of business processes.”
One of the biggest challenges in fund administration is tracking and managing expenditures. Blockchain solutions could solve that issue completely by reducing data inaccuracies, improving interoperability of various enterprise applications and creating more transparent expenditure tracking.
Continued Markham: “For fund managers, financial industry leaders or any regulated group, the ability to show a regulator a report of [expenditures] in real time, having spent far less time and money gathering that data relative to legacy solutions, is immensely powerful.”
As the internet has become inseparable from everyday life and been transferred to our mobile phones whose access is at our fingertips, users have sought instant access to their favorite websites. According to this report by Shopify, page-load speed is one of the most important factors for consumers buying something online.
Even Google decided to incorporate website speed into its algorithm ranking factors as explained by TechCrunch.The world’s most popular search engine considers a page to be “slow” if it takes longer than 1.5 seconds to load!
Miao Zhicheng, a blockchain developer for NOIA Network, believes that blockchain will transform the global internet infrastructure as explained in that company’s white paper.
“The problems of latency, low internet availability and sluggish pace of digital-content progress due to high content delivery costs will soon be over,” Zhicheng wrote. “NOIA Network is solving them by creating a widely dispersed and decentralized content delivery network. This network is formed by household computers and data centers around the globe.
