What is the future of blockchain technology for businesses?
Future of blockchain technology for businesses
Usually, the technology of blockchain is associated with money. It’s easy to explain: blockchain transactions are secure and free (meaning that you don’t need to pay for the transaction, like you would with a bank). However, there are many more applications for blockchains, both within and outside the area of commerce.
Audits Blockchain offers what is essentially a permanent record of transactions, which creates an easy-to-follow paper trail for audits, both internal and governmental. It guarantees accuracies and solves the problem of pulling in records from a number of disparate sources.
Quality assurance Blockchain also has potential when it comes to quality assurance, especially when something goes wrong. Since companies can link every facet of the supply chain, if there is the need for a recall or investigation into where something went wrong, blockchain offers a definitive, contiguous ledger to immediately identify the problem.
Securities and commodities trading Blockchain promises quicker trading on stock exchanges, whether in securities or commodities. The distributed nature of the technology ensures that a process previously undertaken over the course of several days is affirmed and finalized in just several minutes, greatly streamlining the entire experience.
Supply chain management Blockchain can track goods and materials within an organization, as well, such as throughout the supply chain of a manufacturing company. As a product leaves the factory, blockchain could be used to record its arrival at a warehouse and then its shipment out to a retail store
Money Transferring. Let’s begin from here, since we’ve already mentioned it. Money transactions in blockchains are done with the help of various cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, for instance. Those transactions are extremely secure and charge-free, meaning that you can send money to a remote worker on the North Pole and not be afraid that someone’s going to steal it along the way.
Smart Contracts. These are a very secure way to make sure that all terms of a certain contract are fulfilled. The result is achieved by the fact that smart contracts are unbiased and neutral towards all parties involved, they have no human emotions and no incentive to cheat. They are basically algorithms, which run only if all necessary conditions are met. Combine it with the fact that all record of activity is kept within the blockchain, and you get yourself the most transparent way of doing business that is currently known to humanity.
Verification of information (identity/ownership/veracity). If something has been added to the blockchain, it stays there forever no matter what. This means that identities cannot be stolen or altered simply because there is only one identity for each person in the blockchain record. The same goes for their accomplishments: Matt will not say that he painted the picture, because thousands of ledgers say that this work belongs to Betty.
Distributed Cloud Storage. This feature would be useful to anyone in need of storing vast masses of information for a relatively cheap price. If you take all your info, encrypt it and store in tiny bits on all computers in the network, you know for a fact that it’s safe and sound. Most importantly, it will not cost you as much as normal cloud storage would, simply because there are no intermediaries — you pay directly for the service.
Proof-of-Provenance. In production of commodities, it is often a case that producers don’t create all necessary parts, but simply assemble the ones they’ve bought from elsewhere, creating a final product as a result. However, if something is wrong with one of those pieces before the assembly, the one at fault would be not the producer of that particular part, but the final product producer. Blockchains could be used in avoiding such unpleasant situations. The final producer could add logs of each step of production to the blockchain, thus granting themselves the ability to present a credible record of the whole process to investors, stockholders, or to whoever it may concern.
Networking and IOT. Blockchains can become a very useful base to provide communication within a certain company or system. For instance, Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry, which implements blockchains to form a base for cheap autonomous communication between all machines involved. In the other words, they’ve created a blockchain-based Internet of Things (a system of electronic devices, which are connected to the Internet, and interconnected among themselves).