Blockchain: Rewiring the Existing Industries
“Progress is unlikely without change, and those who can rewire their mind can revamp the world.”
According to a Statista report, worldwide expending on blockchain solutions is forecasted to reach 6.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. Thus, it is evitable the massive volume of audience inclined towards this revolutionary technology. Blockchain was initially started as a technology that resists adulteration to document timestamps. However, it becomes widely renowned in 2008 after Satoshi Nakamoto introduces Bitcoin leveraging the Blockchain tech. A peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency where there is no trusted third party. Bitcoin has already been accepted by the European Court of Justice as a valid currency and is exempt from sales taxes. Norton Rose Fulbright
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In the wake of the extensive interest in this futuristic technology, increasing numbers of entities are adopting Blockchain to create new businesses and elevate existing ones. Take banking, for example, it is one of the most popular Blockchain applications, yet it isn’t the only industry affected. Below are the top 5 mainstream industries that Blockchain will soon disrupt:
1. TOURISM INDUSTRY
Travel and tourism are the most happening and flourishing industries known to exist. In the wake of the pandemic, there might be a plunge. Nevertheless, there is nothing that can dampen a human’s spirit to travel and explore. With constraint comes creativity! The tourism industry is witnessing a tectonic shift since the travelers’ preferences have changed due to apparent reasons. The significant challenges faced by travelers are:
i. Lack of Authentic Reviews:
Online customer reviews massively impact consumer’s buying decisions. Centralized companies often mislead novice travelers by selling fake reviews by packaging them as honest opinions. Therefore, to prevent such frauds, a formal review and rating system could be established leveraging the blockchain technology that provides individuals with traceable identities, ensuring the statement’s authenticity. This doesn’t necessarily mean revealing personal identities but merely providing every individual with a secret key that confirms a specific rating or review comes from a valid person.
ii. Monetary Exchange:
In the year 2020, there were approximately 9.84 million U.S. residents who travelled overseas. This number is substantially low compared to the previous year. There is still hope. Travel products frequently involve transferring money across borders and between peers who had no prior business history. Also, while the cross-border exchange of fiat currency happens, an intermediary charge a portion of the transaction leading to an unnecessary bleed of money. Integration of Blockchain will ensure easy and trusted exchange without the involvement of a centralized third party, resulting in a complete consumer-to-consumer transaction.
iii. Online & Offline Travel Agencies:
One can’t fathom the revenue Travel agencies generate due to their unique proposition of shifting power from suppliers to consumers. This is the first wave that transformed the tourism sphere. The second wave could be the Blockchain, which can remove intermediaries such as Travel agencies and exchange entities from the tourism value chain and established a transparent network.
2. AGRICULTRE INDUSTRY:
The agriculture & dairy industry is vital to economic growth. The entire Human civilization is dependent on these two industries through and through. Still, they’re the largest unorganized industry globally. With the intervention of Blockchain, there could be a significant shift in Agriculture & Dairy from the viewpoint of both consumer and farmer.
i. Consumer:
It is the fundamental right of the consumer to have organic and healthy food. Furthermore, they have the right to know what place their food has originated and the people behind manufacturing and supplying it. Blockchain will enable the agriculture supply chain to be more stringent, not allowing any third party to book unnecessary profits and degrade the food quality for the sake of self-benefit. Fusing IoT (Internet of Things) and Blockchain to create a decentralized system will transcend the consumer experience to whole another level. A barcode attached to a distributed ledger where there are signatures of the farmers and suppliers behind the food product will educate the consumer and assure them of the authenticity of what they’re consuming. There will be no central authority to update or tweak the information. As soon someone tries to edit, there will be an alert catching the fraud.
ii. Farmers & Dairy Producers:
Often, local farmers and dairy producers become victims to intermediaries who book significant profits with zero investment of their own. Farmers invest an abundance of money, time, and energy to cultivate the crop and bear the losses if Mother nature is not in their favour. With the intervention of Blockchain, a farmer can track where and what price his food products were sold and revaluate their price selection process. Also, through IoT, they can view inventory and predict the future demand of their stock.
3. HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
Pandemic has compelled the global healthcare infrastructure to advance rapidly. The growth in medical data, supply, and demand of medicines and medical equipment is accompanied by the need to process the information securely. As this industry’s infrastructure consists of coherent devices and software applications that communicate with other Information Technology systems, it will be massively impacted by the intervention of Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies will improve processing efficiency, business opportunities, information security, and transparency.
With this complex background, let us now consider two use cases of Blockchain in the Healthcare industry.
i. Supply Chain Management
The supply chain is a collection of multiple events choreographed by various parties across geographies. To build a seamless, efficient, and secure supply chain, all parties must exercise a certain level of faith. Blockchain has the potential to instill such trust without physically striving to know the credibility of anyone. The three facets of the supply chain which Blockchain could disrupt are:
i.a. Vendor Management,
i.b. Inventory Management, and
i.c. Payment Management.
A blockchain could provide coherent data persistence across a distributed system secured cryptographically.
e.g.,
An XYZ air-cooler distributor is looking for a manufacturer on the blockchain network. He founds ABC has great transaction history, and his delivery service is impeccable. As this is a decentralized network, there is no possibility that ABC could have tweaked the data. He sends an order worth 100 coolers to ABC, and as soon as the order is delivered to XYZ, a set payment will get automatically credited to ABC’s wallet.
ii. Data Security
Think of a decentralized, secure ledger of medical data that serves as the foundation of the global electronic health record, inventions, and interventions by medical researchers, documents, and studies; all this publicly accessible in real-time by authorized personnel having a secure key.
CONCLUSION
There are thousands of practical use cases of Blockchain. Only a few are known to us as of now. As times will evolve and tech geeks began to explore the pain of the people. Blockchain will soon emerge as a universal solution to the problems of human civilization.
