4 Innovative Use Cases For Blockchain
Blockchain has quickly become one of the most dominant and promising technologies of the past year. With digital assets soaring and fledgling crypto-startups beginning to find product market fit, the blockchain movement has finally staked solid ground. As many technologists and industry experts predict, we are just scratching the surface of this massive digital revolution.
While you are likely familiar with the most highly covered applications of blockchain, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, chances are you have yet to fully explore the long term implications of this technology.
Many of the world’s most important and valuable industries, like oil and freight, are dependent on third-party intermediaries who manage and control access to information. Any given supply chainoften has between five and ten independent brokerage services that work to streamline the end-to-end funnel. The problem, however, is that many of these ‘agents’ have misaligned incentives, in that they are all fighting for their own slice of the profit.
By leveraging blockchain systems, we can cut out intermediary parties and entrust an algorithm to manage network access to critical data and information. For example, the healthcare sector, overridden with regulation and inefficiencies, is primed for blockchain disruption. Blockchains can be used to automatically authorize information exchanged among insurance companies, patients and hospitals.
This change will allow all stakeholders within the healthcare system to sync in real-time, as well as greatly reduce the amount of human touch points. Implemented at scale, we can remove the error of human bias and maintain cleaner, more accurate transactional databases.
Blockchains can be implemented to express ownership and authorize access to sensitive information. For instance, the emerging blockchain startup, TrustToken, has developed a digital-legal protocol that enables physical assets to be owned and managed by smart contracts, using trust entities to provide enforcement under civil and criminal law.
When applied to real world assets like timeshares and small businesses, this innovative type of trust contract effectively connects and validates ownership, thereby eliminating disputes over legitimacy.
The tokenization service that TrustToken provides may quickly become the de facto way to record ownership for real property. This greatly eliminates fraud in the residential and commercial real estatemarkets and, more broadly, can become the formal signature of asset ownership.
The distributed nature of blockchain ledgers provide a number of security advantages over typical data warehouses. Given that blockchain networks have no single access point (for infiltration), thethreat of hacking is greatly diminished. Cryptocurrencies, like SparkleCOIN, a highly transactable ecosphere of tokens, are leveraging these security features to provide blockchain systems for the masses. These will be the first highly scalable, widely adopted applications of blockchain.
