Blockchain transformation is an ongoing process, a long-term goal for the business future. For this reason, building a blockchain roadmap should be the step in establishing the digital future of your business. Blockchain is famously known for supporting crypto, but this technology is making a fast way into many aspects of our daily life from vaccine passports to finance gaming and cross-border payments. The market for blockchain technology and services is projected to grow to $67.4 billion by 2026, from $4.9 billion this year, according to researchers MarketsandMarkets.
Thanks to the recent popularity surge of digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the term “blockchain” has gone from obscure technical jargon to one of the most bandied buzzwords in business and financial news. However, the concepts behind blockchain remain widely misunderstood, and most people still think its uses are limited to storing digital coins.
So, what is Blockchain?
Blockchain allows for the creation of a decentralized public record of digital information. The data is stored in a public database and can comprise any information. The technology offers anyone a chance to access and conduct transactions on a common digital ledger. Since all the modifications to the ledger are constantly recorded in real-time, the changes are completely transparent. The technology can be used for more secure and transparent public transactions and private ledgers for inter-company transactions and record keeping.
Why should you adopt blockchain technology on your business platform?
There are many advantages to implementing blockchain technology. The primary advantage would be it can help in improving operational efficiency and productivity levels of the business. The major benefits associated with this technology are:
- Trust
- Decentralized structure
- Improved security and privacy
- Reduced costs
- Speed
- Visibility and traceability
- Individual control of data
- Tokenization
Here are some of the practical applications of blockchain technology:
Financial services
Compared to traditional transaction systems, blockchain-based transactions happen at a much lesser time and are fully transparent. Recent research carried out by CryptoCoinsNews shows that blockchain adoption in banks will save $27 billion on cross-border settlement transactions annually by 2030.
Cryptocurrency
A shared distributed ledger that is cryptographically encrypted stores the ownership records of the individual coins. Since the transactions on the ledger are not governed by a central authority, it reduces the risk and transaction costs involved. Examples are Bitcoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, etc.
Healthcare
From secure health record management, medical staff credentialing, drug traceability to fraudulent activity detection in clinical trials, blockchain revolutionizes the way both patients and healthcare providers manage the healthcare data. As per the report by BIS Research, the global spending of the healthcare industry will reach $5.61 billion by 2025.
Smart contracts
A smart contract is a digital agreement that helps you exchange digital currencies, shares, land properties, or anything of value-added between two or more parties in an agreeable and transparent manner without an intermediary service.
Supply chain
Adopting blockchain technology in supply chain operations can help us integrate better transparency into the process. The effects can ripple out from raw materials gathering to end consumption. It can improve traceability of consumer goods or finished products during delivery and can help better trademarking of consumer goods or finished products.
Government
Blockchain technology in government models can help keep both citizens and government data secure, build trust in government systems, streamline operations, minimize fraudulent activities, authenticate voters in elections, prevent corruption and wastage of resources. Since blockchain-powered governance models are not controlled by a centralized authority, it significantly reduces the chances of failure.
Media
It brings traceability into intellectual digital content, prevents piracy of content, reduces restrictions on paid content access across boundaries, introduces royalty payments using smart contracts, and monetization of digital content through P2P micro-payments.
Real estate
Blockchain enables us to tokenize real-time assets, reduce operations costs, efficiently manage ownerships of a pool of assets, discover alternative market opportunities, better management of financial instruments, reliable asset portfolio management, and also help us take timely investment decisions. One of the major advantages of using blockchain in real estate is that it could be used to greatly improve the land registry process.
Closing thoughts
The roadblock to blockchain adoption is the mixed reactions from the business leaders. They have well realized that they can save billions by implementing blockchain technology. With the blockchain use cases spanning from financial applications to fashion and healthcare, it would not be long enough that the blockchain technology will be adopted beyond the pandemic, but it will be always wise to do your own proper research in blockchain before making any kind of investment.
Accubits is a global blockchain development service provider which delivers reliable blockchain systems which will provide better traceability, security, and better processing of data and transactions.
