EXPLAINING BLOCKCHAIN TECH

What is Blockchain ?

Blockchain is a technology that allows transactions to be secure and anonymous. It’s the same technology that drives bitcoin and other digital currencies.
In short, blockchain creates a true peer-to-peer secure transaction.
Blockchain has two main jobs:

1. Securing your data (trust)
2. Recording virtually everything of value (history)

Well, blockchain works. It is no longer reserved for a small circle of tech specialists.

And it’s here to stay.

Now that you’ve seen an overview of what blockchain is, let’s dive straight into some mind-boggling blockchain startup ideas.

Finance | Power | Healthcare | Real Estate | Tourism | Social | Marketplace | Identity | Mathematics | Transport | Entertainment | Rights Protection | Government | Charity | Technology | Human Resource | Photos, Music & Videos | Retail, F&B | Business | Education
Finance
Transfer Money Internationally

1. Transfer Money Internationally
   What do you do when you need to transfer small amounts internationally? You probably use a transfer service like Western Union. This trusted middleman transfers money between its offices worldwide. Finally, balances its accounts on the backend, using international bank transfers. However, these services often charge a fee of 10 percent or more to you.

But today, blockchain applications in banking is changing the way money is sending around the world, at a lower fee. Bitcoin is such first use case. Companies like Ripple, tapping on this radical financial technology, change the way money is sent around the world for everyday customers.

Allow Fast Borrow & Lend Money

1. Allow Fast Borrow & Lend Money
   Have you ever try to borrow money from a bank? Let’s face it: The current lending industry is inefficient. Especially with lots of documents to fill up, and high-interest rate. P2P lending is rapidly growing in personal finance. Now, both borrowers and lenders are connected all over the world via blockchain. All without giving the bank their cut.

As lenders, you can remain completely anonymous and does not need to register anywhere. Just select your preferred loan from the marketplace. Next, initiate from your wallets. Borrowers can return the loan in a low- interest environment.

Lendoit, 100% decentralized, is disrupting the traditional lending industry. The marketplace lending estimates to reach $290 billion by 2020.

Make Foreign Exchange Post Trade Processing Efficient

1. Make Foreign Exchange Post Trade Processing Efficient
   Foreign exchange is the largest and most liquid asset classes in the word. It is complex to capture, reconcile and settle trading activity.

Axoni’s platform provides fully synchronized integration with third-party market data providers. Thus, improving efficiency in the overall market.

Stock Market On Blockchain

1. Stock Market On Blockchain
   Imagine companies are able to register, issue and trade shares on a blockchain-based platform. What does it mean to you? In brief, you can buy company shares using digital currency.

London Stock Exchange tests this out by issuing digital private shares of small and medium companies in Italy.

Moreover, Overstock, an online retailer, started to issue company shares via bitcoin blockchain technology applications.

Increase High Uptime For Central Bank

1. Increase High Uptime For Central Bank
   The use of a cashless system is growing. For example, credit card, Apple Pay or QR code payment. But, what happens when the system goes offline for long period of time?

There’s chaos.

The fact that bitcoin has been operating for a long time, and has not suffered even a nanosecond of downtime. As a result, increasing number of central banks are actively testing blockchain for a variety of usage. In particular, for its resiliency and transparency.

Reduce Insurance Fraud

1. Reduce Insurance Fraud
   Insurance can be exposed to numerous fraud schemes. For example, a new applicant can commit fraud by withholding critical information. Or, by filing a claim on behalf of ineligible dependents.

So what can we do to reduce insurance fraud? Well, record medical procedures and time stamp via blockchain platform. This helps compliance and verification of medical services rendered. Together with IBM and Cateina Technologies, fifteen Indian insurers tied up to create this blockchain based solution.

Transfer Digital Wills

1. Transfer Digital Wills
   The number of people using cryptocurrency to store funds is growing all the time. But, what happens to your cryptocurrency if you die without a will? How can you prevent a loss of your saving and allow them to be transferred to your loved ones?

By using Mywish, you create smart contracts to handle your funds during a crisis. This allows you to transfer your’s savings to family or friends in the event of a serious illness or death.

Predict The Stock Markets

1. Predict The Stock Markets
   One of the main problems with current prediction markets is that they are centralized. As a result, centralized platforms have a single form of failure. And, they can be shut down easier. For such centralized design, this requires a trusted individual to report honestly and correctly every time. But, what if this person makes mistakes, dishonest or manipulates results?

With Augur, thousands of users (instead of one) work together to have a stunning accurate forecasting tool.

Power
Lower Electricity Bills At Home

1. Lower Electricity Bills At Home
   Accenture revealed a smart plug (proof of concept) to monitor power use and save cost. First, the prototype works with other gadgets and monitor power use. Next, it searches the cheapest energy tariffs. Finally, it uses blockchain to switch suppliers quickly. As a result, this helps many people on a lower income who pay for their power via a meter.

Trade Solar Power With Neighbors

1. Trade Solar Power With Neighbors
   Are you willing to use your electricity to charge a battery at peak hours, when the price is at the highest? Or, do you rather use solar power to do the same task at a lower cost?

This project runs by LO3 Energy, aims to enable people to buy and sell renewable energy to their neighbors.

This is how it works.

While solar panels on the roofs of terraced houses soak up the sun, computers connected to the panels quietly crunch numbers. Next, they count the number of electrons generated. Then, they write that number to a blockchain. In this way, you can trade solar power and skip the electricity company energy supply.

Healthcare
Secure Medical Records

1. Secure Medical Records
   Today, doctors, nurses & health professionals are limited in the level of care they can provide.

Why?

Because due to the inability to view your complete accurate health records.

With blockchain applications in healthcare, now you can publish your medical records safely on the blockchain. And, be assured that you or an authorized person can access it anywhere in the world.

Estonia government collaborates with one of the blockchain technology companies, Guardtime. Specifically, to build a blockchain of citizen’s health records. With this, citizens carry their ID credentials to unlock access to their health records in real time.

Check for Fake Medicine

1. Check for Fake Medicine
   You wouldn’t tell if the medicine is genuine until you put it inside your stomach.

Blockverify provides a solution to track pharmaceuticals throughout the supply chain. And, to ensure the consumers receive an authentic product.

Real Estate
Registry of Land Ownership

1. Registry of Land Ownership
   To maintain a country registry of land ownership is not only expensive, and also a labor-intensive operation.

Ubitquity is the first blockchain secured platform for real estate record keeping. It records, tracks title and other property records. Moreover, it reduces future title search time, and improve transparency.

Sweden government partners with ChromaWay Here, they aim to test the possibility of a blockchain based land registry.

Tourism
Offer Tourist Coupons And Incentives

1. Offer Tourist Coupons And Incentives
   Whether you like it or not, companies provide traditional paper, plastic tokens, coupons, discount and other sorts of inefficient reward and loyalty rewards to their customers.

Rouge allows companies to make use of this new digital format into their customer services programs, creating their own Blockchain loyalty tokens and coins for their customers.

Fill Up Empty Hotel Rooms

1. Fill Up Empty Hotel Rooms
   If you are a sales representative in the hotel industry, you will appreciate this solution. Imagine your hotel guest does a last minute cancellation for his long stay. And to make the situation worse, he refuses to pay. Moreover, it’s very challenging to find a substitute customer for the vacant room within a short time.

Webjet is an online traveling portal that allows stock of empty hotel rooms to be efficiently tracked and traded.

Social
Manage User Reputations

1. Manage User Reputations
   Airbnb recently began experiments to use a blockchain as a way to manage user reputations.

Why?

Storing this information in a decentralized blockchain frees up Airbnb’s servers.

The company replies on reviews left by both renters and landlords. As a result, the customer can judge how trustworthy potential hosts or guests will be.

Marketplace
Buy & Sell Advertising Space

1. Buy & Sell Advertising Space
   Are you tired of paying high online advertising costs? Or how about fearful of being banned with your online content?

Thrive is a blockchain rewarding marketspace where buyers and sellers buy advertising at very low fees. If you like to review websites and share data, you can get paid too.

Know More About The Things You Buy

1. Know More About The Things You Buy
   You just bought a high-quality bag, and wonders if there’s more information to it. What if you can look beyond the label, and discover the honest data on creators’ work, history, and impact?

Provenance equips physical products with a unique ID. Through the ID, you gain access a secure digital history from how the product is made to the delivery into your hands.

Get Rid Of Banner Ads

1. Get Rid Of Banner Ads
   Isn’t it annoying to see many web banners while you read the article? And, and you ignore them, right?

Solidopinion allows advertisers to show ads only to the interested & targeted audience. This is how it works: Advertiser places target relevant ads just above the headline of a great article. And, this is right where your targeted audience is.

Zero Platform Fees

1. Zero Platform Fees
   For popular online marketplace, sellers usually have to pay some fees to the platform. Of course, these fees are either absorbed by sellers or passed down to the buyers.

Openbazaar is a unique online marketplace which accepts the only cryptocurrency. It’s a peer to peer application with no fees and restrictions as there are no middlemen. You are in control of your own store and private data.

Identity
Tell The Word About Your Identity

1. Tell The Word About Your Identity
   The way we prove our identity to others, remains reliant on paper and plastic documents, physical contact and handwritten signatures.

Today, our identity data are held by individual organizations as we engage offline and online. Often, data is poorly integrated and out of date. This duplication is error prone and inefficient, and present security risks.

There ought to be a simpler way to maintain our identity, with a master identity records. For this reason, it’s maintained directly by each user. Deloitte blockchain applications offers a solution to allow both security and privacy, with a distributed identity platform.

Mathematics
Solve Complex Mathematics Problems

1. Solve Complex Mathematics Problems
   The Riemann hypothesis is a complicated Mathematics question that has yet to be proven. This remains one outstanding mystery of the field. Such math question requires massive supercomputers to discover and prove.

Another cryptocurrency, Riecoin, set out to solve such problem involving prime numbers. Many mathematicians expect that the Riemann hypothesis will eventually be resolved with the help of Riecoin.

Transport
Rent Out Parking Space

1. Rent Out Parking Space
   Imagine you need a parking space in a crowded area. Wouldn’t it be good if you can locate, secure and pay a parking spot beforehand?

Using blockchain, parking owners can rent out their long-term parking space that is unused. Especially, if they are away on holidays. This helps other drivers who only need temporary parking.

Parkgene aims to be the Airbnb for temporary parking spaces.

Help Driverless Car To Pay Parking Fees

1. Help Driverless Car To Pay Parking Fees
   A driverless car is already a reality. But, it does not mean a car without driver enjoys free parking. Someone still has to pay the parking fees.

These cars do not own a traditional bank account. But, they can have one in the blockchain. With Car Wallet, the car is notified when you send money to its wallet. Then you can open the door, authorize the start of the engine, and pay the parking fees.

Rent A Car

1. Rent A Car
   When you rent a car, you need to show your driving license and fill up some documents. You pay the money and got the car key. That’s seamless to you, isn’t it? But, in reality, the whole car rental process is pretty complicated. It just that car companies make leasing look so easy. The main challenge faced by car leasing companies is that information is not updated.

Just imagine using blockchain. Every participant in the car rental supply chain can monitor, share, analyze and update latest information. Best of all, you get the latest info regardless where the car is in the lifecycle.

With IBM blockchain, the whole car rental supply enjoys lower processing time, consistent information and reduced overhead cost.

Real-Time Hitch Riding

1. Real-Time Hitch Riding
   Nowadays, hitching a ride is common. And, the passenger pays driver with either cash or credit. How about digital currency?

LaZooz is a community-owned real-time ridesharing service, powered by blockchain. This platform synchronizes empty seats with passengers in real time, matching like-minded people. And the good news is? Both drivers and passengers get rewards like digital tokens.

Peer To Peer Ridesharing

1. Peer To Peer Ridesharing
   When Uber decided to pull out of a city, what happens? Thousands of drivers become out of job, and passengers stranded.

Arcade City aims to beat Uber by moving ride sharing and car hiring onto the blockchain, without a middleman. Once both riders and drivers are connected directly, they earn Arcade Tokens. Which, they can either sell immediately for cash or use for services and bonus features.

This network has provided safe, reliable transportation to major U.S city for more than a year.

Go To Space

1. Go To Space
   Ever thought of going to space for a holiday tour?

Virgin Galactic is not taking passengers to space yet, but they are selling tickets. To join the line cost $250,000, and you can pay in bitcoins.

Pay Lower For Charging Of Electric Cars

1. Pay Lower For Charging Of Electric Cars
   To charge an electric car, you pay for the amount of time spent connected to the car charging station.

Why?

Because the old billing system is not able to calculate the exact electricity used. And, this amount of time that we talked about, is generally in hours.

The aim is to connect electric vehicles charging stations to a blockchain. The charging station handles user authentication, payment processing, and loyalty point assignment. This simplifies the whole billing to solve an existing bottleneck in the energy market.

RWE, a German energy company, had launched hundreds of car charging stations all over Germany. These are connected to ethereum’s public blockchain. Now, users can charge their cars and pay in micro transactional slices.

Reduce Paperwork For Shipping Industry

1. Reduce Paperwork For Shipping Industry
   Margins are already slim in container shipping. Yet, the processing of paperwork is more costly than the shipping container.

Maersk, the largest container ship operator and IBM formed a joint venture to use blockchain technology. They aim to make global trade more efficient, transparent and secure.

Entertainment
Pay Per Use – Watch A Single Football Match

1. Pay Per Use – Watch A Single Football Match
   Companies love a flat monthly subscription fee model. Why? The revenue is recurring and predictable. But, why can’t we pay to watch a single football match, instead of the whole football channel?

Using uRaiden, service providers give viewers an option to decide on a pay-per-use basis for digital content. This payment is via micropayments in Ethereum based tokens.

Rights Protection
Brand Protection For Wine

1. Brand Protection For Wine
   If you are a wine lover, you going to love this. Do you know experts estimate 20% of wine consumed worldwide is counterfeit? These fake wines are refilled and sold to us. Not only have these fakes caused a loss of revenue of more than 2 billion a year. More importantly, consumer lost confidence in branded wine.

Chronicled developed a blockchain platform to secure the identities of wine labels and bottle tops. With this, you can easily verify authenticity by scanning the seal with a smartphone.

Protect Fine Art Produced By Talented Artists

1. Protect Fine Art Produced By Talented Artists
   Copy a fine art from a gallery is not difficult. All you need is to take a photo and get an online freelancer to reproduce it. Buyers are increasingly wary of art forgery.

Chronicled developed a solution with cryptographic microchips embedded in the paintings, and registered to blockchain. As a result, buyers are able to tell if the painting is genuine.

Protect Luxury Sneakers

1. Protect Luxury Sneakers
   Do you know that footwear is the most commonly counterfeited item? Have you ever wonder how the fake manufacturer earn by selling sneaker at a much cheaper cost? Well, these manufacturer earns huge profits as they bypass manufacturing costs like original design and research, marketing, and regulation. Even sneaker experts found it difficult to distinguish fakes from real ones.

With Chronicled’s solution, you can pull out your smartphone and scans the microchip in the sneakers. And, you will know if the sneaker (by Michael Jordan) is real or fake.

Give Your Valuables A Digital Identity

1. Give Your Valuables A Digital Identity
   Losing your valuables is a painful experience. Giving police the serial number of your stolen valuables is not enough.

At VTT, you can protect what you love. Whether it is a bicycle, drones, escooter or luxury handbag. You write your proof of ownership to the Ethereum blockchain – forever. In this way, it makes easier recovery of these portable stolen assets.

Government
Provide Untampered Votes During Election

1. Provide Untampered Votes During Election
   Some common ways a country vote is through a paper-based system or e-voting via a machine in a polling station or i-voting through a web browser. There are always doubts about the voting system ability to secure data and defend against potential attacks. After all, every vote counts have a huge impact on a country.

Agora provided a voting platform to ensure transparent and verifiable elections around the world. During the Sierra Leone’s 2018 Presidential election, Agora did a proof of concept experiment.

Guess what?

Both results from government officials and experiment had the same results. We are not far away to use this technology for future elections.

Charity
Raise Money To Help The Unfortunate

1. Raise Money To Help The Unfortunate
   You want to donate money to a good cause. Yet, you’re unsure if your donation lands straight to the needy.

Bitgive provides transparency to charity donations. You get to know the donation outcomes in real time.

Also, Dogecoin was lauded as a good coin to raise money for charity. Dogecoin supporters put this claim to the test in 2014, when they raised $30,000 to help send Jamaican to Sochi Olympics.

Technology
Control Robots Remotely

1. Control Robots Remotely
   There’s no doubt that AI learns, manage tasks in an intelligent, thoughtful manner. When tasks are too complex for AI, you can outsource these tasks. Freelancers will be able to control robots operations from a distance as “pilots”.

With Aitheon platform, this allows remote workers to generate extra cash by directing robots to perform complex tasks and increase automation.

Host Your Site Without Any Central Server

1. Host Your Site Without Any Central Server
   You need website service when your site is down. In most cases, the outage is due to server overload. Would it be good if your online content does not require any central server?

Zeronet creates an entirely decentralized internet. It aims to sidestep the need to host websites on servers by stashing website information across the internet in small pieces. Next, they are linked together using a blockchain registry. This eliminates web hosting costs and always accessible.

Renting Out Your Hard Drive Space

1. Renting Out Your Hard Drive Space
   To pay for cloud storage is expensive in the long run. Though uptime is pretty decent, there’s a chance of downtime due to outages and DDos attack. Also, is your private data in the cloud really private? They are often duplicated across multiple data centers and backup.

Storj.io is a cloud share by the community that provides lower cost, a higher level of privacy and reliability. The power of Storj platform is its unique ability to utilize the free capacity of a storage node, whether a single PC or a huge data center. Good news is that you are paid by renting out your unused PC hard disk space.

Tools To Create Blockchain Applications

1. Tools To Create Blockchain Applications
   The commercial is slow to adopt blockchain due to insufficient blockchain infrastructure.

Settlemint and Cypherium aim to provide fundamental building blocks for developers to create more applications.

Get Printer To Order For Ink Cartridge

1. Get Printer To Order For Ink Cartridge
   You start pulling your hair for such situation: It’s late at night. Your printer runs out of ink when you are about to print a very important document.

IBM and Samsung envision machines can talk to each other. Just imagine, the printer uses smart contract to issue commands to an ink cartridge retailer to receive new supplies. In this way, you save lots of frustrations with the ready spare ink cartridge. Also, you save tons of hair too.

Human Resource
Hire New Freshgrads With Confidence

1. Hire New Fresh Grads With Confidence
   There are fake news. And, there are fake certifications. If you ever hire a freshgrad, you know the whole hiring process can be slow and painful one. How do you verify the new hire certification is genuine? You would need to contact the school one by one.

Imagine a world where certifications were written securely, where they could not be deleted or changed. Now, sharing them with employers for the purpose of recruitment becomes transparent and easy. Smartchain offers this solution for digital educational certificates.

Hire Experience Workers

1. Hire Experience Workers
   Can your potential new hire fake his resume? Think about it again. Past work experiences shown in resume and Linkedin, are all written by the job candidates themselves. You wouldn’t know if it’s real unless the HR does the hard work of calling every past employer.

Here’s good news for the employers. Echolink, aims to provide real transparency for the job market. This startup verifies a job candidate’s skills and work experience. Thus, saving time for recruiters.

Get Help From Nearby Certified Workers Fast

1. Get Help From Nearby Certified Workers Fast
   This is an on-demand economy. When your air-con is leaking, you need expert help immediately. Companies like Uber, Upwork and Airbnb own a huge percentage of the services market. Yet, it is not enough for other help required.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you can gain access to a nearby certified specialist who can get your job done efficiently? ConnectJob focus on on-demand services and provides a proper channel for rewards.

Photos, Music & Videos
Protect Photos Ownership

1. Protect Photos Ownership
   You capture an awesome picture of the sunset. The moment you place it on your blog, the image can be used extensively without your consent. In fact, photographers all over the world, are facing this problem of copyright infringement and piracy. Well, even with the practice of stock photography (eg. shutterstock, istock), the control and rights of images have been difficult.

KodakONE secures the work of photographers.

How does it work?

Photographers register their work first on this platform. Next, they get tracking to make sure their images aren’t used online without their permission. Finally, photographers get licensing payments automatically.

Pay Musicians On Time

1. Pay Musicians On Time
   Throughout the whole music revolution, the core relationship between artist’s contracts, payments, licensing and copyrights remains the same. Now, who benefit the most? Musician record labels and publishers benefit from it. It takes months and years to pay out royalties to artists and composers.

Revelator helps musicians to create a faster transaction around payments and royalty distribution.

Pay Digital Content Creators

1. Pay Digital Content Creators
   Digital content creators are the musicians, filmmakers & writers. They produce awesome content. Yet, not many are paid well.

Smoogs provide an easy way for content writers to be paid for what they do. As for the audience, they pay only for what they consume.

Ease Payments For Music Distributors

1. Ease Payments For Music Distributors
   The aim is to allow musicians and distributors to share details of rights and royalties for music tracks online.
   These smart contracts automatically license recordings and take payment each time they are played.

A startup Ujomusic is trying to use the Ethereum blockchain to transform the music industry payment.

Retail, F&B
Trade Loyalty Rewards

1. Trade Loyalty Rewards
   Very often, you are rewarded with loyalty points from different companies. And, what’s the downside? You cannot use these hard-earned points with another company.

Loyyal aims to allow consumers to combine and trade loyalty rewards. Retailers can offer more sophisticated loyalty packages.

Give Your Friend A Gift Card

1. Give Your Friend A Gift Card
   Your friend’s birthday is coming. You can get her a gift card with digital currencies.

Blockpoint allows retailers to build payment systems for blockchain derived gift cards.

Discover The Origin Of Your Lamb Meat

1. Discover The Origin Of Your Lamb Meat
   The food industry has seen a rise in false alarms, leaving shoppers confused and supply chain at risk.

With provenance, you can track the journey of fresh produce from source to the shelf in real time. As such, you can know if the lamb chop is infected since you know the origin.

Provenance is linked with food retail giant, The Co-op, based in UK.

Buy Pizza

1. Buy Pizza
   In April 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz convinced someone to send a couple of pizza to his home in exchange for 10,000 bitcoins. At the end of 2016, when bitcoin was trading over $700 each, those same pizza would be worth $3.5 million a piece.

Business
Charge Accurately For Consultation

1. Charge Accurately For Consultation
   If you provide consultation through phone calls, it’s troublesome to calculate your fees by time. Is the usual per hour charging mode fair to your customer if she consults you for only 10 minutes?

Experty provides a way to connect two or more people to exchange a paid knowledge via online voice or video call. Instead of per hour block, per minute rates are set by experts.

If you find the expert fails to provide a good service, refunds can be given too. Once both parties are happy, payment is deducted via the Ethereum blockchain instantly.

Protect Your Patents

1. Protect Your Patents
   Let’s say you have a great idea. Some questions for you.

How do you know if it’s really unique?

And, how to protect it quickly?

When you do a professional search, this can cost you up to $3000. Did I tell you the cost is for a single search? Even if you decide to file, the whole patent process takes an average of 16 months for filing publish.

LOCIsearch, a platform for IP discovery and mining, allows inventors to work with a patent lawyer to file or sell their IP directly to buyers. Inventing is now for anyone.

Make Legal Contracts Smart

1. Make Legal Contracts Smart
   Say, you need to buy a commercial office. Money and deeds are usually passed to a trusted third party such as a lawyer or a bank. When the third party is satisfied that both sides of the deal have fulfilled their contract requirements, they hand over the money and agreements accordingly.

Now, a smart contract could do this automatically, without requiring a third party. Both deeds and money are given to the program in a digital form directly, along with the agreement.

Education
Receive Relevant Education

1. Receive Relevant Education
   By the time most students completed their degree, the skills learned become irrelevant for the employment. And, there’s an immediate pressure to start paying off the huge student loans.

Imagine your ideal job requires Big Data skillset. Instead of enrolling yourself in a school that probably teach you outdated techniques. Now, you learn the relevant skills in real time.

Odem creates global education marketplace to connect student, educator and professional that are interested to continue their education.

Pay Degree Course

1. Pay Degree Course
   The University of Nicosia in Cyprus, Greece accepts bitcoin to pay for tuition. This makes sense as they offer a Master of Science degree in Digital Currency.