How do you know where your coffee beans come from? How about your gold? Blockchain could soon help to track and verify the origins of many luxury goods, from diamonds to designer handbags.
With the help of blockchain, consumers will be able to see exactly what they’re buying, says Rachel Mayer, director at ConsenSys Enterprise, an incubator for new applications of the technology.
Many governments are also interested in using blockchain as part of a national system for recording property ownership or land titles, says Shyam Sundararajan, a computer science professor at New York University who works on blockchain projects.
The World Economic Forum predicts that 10% of the global gross domestic product will be stored on blockchain by 2025. Now, blockchain is poised to become more than a buzzword, with startups and large companies alike racing to figure out how the technology could reshape their industries.
Blockchain is a giant ledger of transactions maintained by a network of computers across the internet. It‘s designed to be tamper-proof because it synchronizes real-time and records transactions chronologically. All of this makes it ideal for recording financial transactions, such as stocks and bonds or currency and cryptocurrency trades. But blockchain is also useful for recording other sorts of information.
The technology generated more than $1 billion in venture capital in the first half of this year and could grow into a $7.7 billion market by mid-2022, according to WinterGreen Research Inc., which specializes in technology research. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., for instance, has proposed using blockchain to settle securities trades almost instantaneously ”a technological feat that would dramatically cut costs for end-users.
How Blockchain Will Be Used in Various Industries
This innovative technology has led to many different applications that have the potential to disrupt many industries. Here are just a few ways blockchain technology can be used:
Supply chains
Blockchain technology is making supply chains more transparent by providing an unchangeable record of where products are coming from, who handled them along the way, and when they were shipped out. Supply chains can be complex and involve numerous people in various locations, so this type of secure system reduces errors, theft, and delays.
Banking and Financial Services
Banking and finance- The financial industry is one of the most common sectors for blockchain implementation due to its ability to remove third-party institutions from transactions. In fact, according to Deloitte, about 15 percent of banks are already experimenting with blockchain for global payments. This can save both consumers and banks money by reducing transaction fees between foreign exchange services, transfer services, and international banks.
Gaming
The gaming industry will also benefit from blockchain. Gamers have long wanted to have digital items that they could take from one game to another and potentially sell for real money or trade for other digital items within the same game. Blockchain makes this possible through non-fungible tokens ”a sort of token that represents something unique and valuable (like a sword), rather than something fungible (like a dollar). Games like Axie Infinity encourage players to breed rare, non-fungible tokens, which can then be sold on secondary markets.
Healthcare
Truly decentralized, secure data storage systems will help revolutionize healthcare. Blockchain could help patients have access to their medical records from one provider or hospital system to another, which would increase the portability and security of data.
A patient’s medical history could be transferred from one hospital to another for a second opinion, or a provider could access their patient’s records when they are treating them at their office.
Blockchain can also be used as a personal health record tool for consumers who want more control over their health data. They could share this information only with certain providers if they so choose instead of having it available to everyone involved in their care.
It is important to note that there are potential security issues with using blockchain to hold sensitive data like medical records or DNA information. Right now, it isn’t clear if a blockchain could be corrupted by hackers or if encryption methods are strong enough.
To sum up
The trend is happening rapidly and it’s not hard to understand why. For example, in the real estate market, blockchain technology can be used to execute contracts and payments with no third-party intermediary or paperwork (which means there are less opportunities for fraud and corruption).
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Blockchain development could boost the global economy US$1.76 trillion by 2030 according to PWC. The size of the market will be determined by the scope of its applications as well as the adoption rate in various industries and regions across the globe.
