Table of Contents
Don't miss the chance to work with top 1% of developers.
Sign Up Now and Get FREE CTO-level Consultation.
Home - Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrency: Revolutionizing Industries
In simple words, it just makes one think about the word “cryptocurrency” or, for that matter, Bitcoin. And rightly so; after all, Bitcoin and its cousins are using blockchain as their functional home. But that is not all. This technological revolution-that is, one that makes it possible to store and conduct data in secure, transparent, and decentralised methods – will be applied virtually in every imaginable application-from healthcare and supply chain management to real estate and voting systems. The promise of blockchain is that this revolution comes with greater degrees of transparency and comes through efficiency and security.
It simply defines blockchain as the decentralised distributed ledger of transactions distributed on multiple computers for security, transparency, and resistance to tampering. Information entered into the blockchain cannot be modified or erased; hence, blockchain has been termed the ultimate solution for use in the industries that necessitate secure, transparent, and verifiable record-keeping.
Much potential in this technology, even at this nascent stage. Let’s take a peek into how blockchain changes various industries and what might be the future with this kind of revolutionary technology.
1. Blockchain in Healthcare: Safe Patient Data
Most probably, it has been the way to maintain and share them without compromising sensitive information that was the biggest challenge the healthcare industry faced for that long period. Electronic health records streamlined healthcare but brought problems like data breaches and cyberattacks. Blockchain solves this by offering a method in which medical records could be kept safely and decentralised for sharing.
And, vice versa, patients can be in control of their data held on blockchain only but with patient-held access granted, however, to healthcare providers when required. All the medical records, if held on blockchain, would be accessible only to authorised persons and the integrity assured as practically blockchain does not allow the possibility of amendment or deletion of any record entered.
Thus, in having blockchain, there would be efficient communication among service providers in the health sector, in that a patient would see more than one service provider without necessarily having to transfer details manually. For that reason thus, it would be an efficient health system, and the probability of errors in data thus obtained as having either incomplete or perhaps outdated details would be diminished.
Other than recording the patients, blockchain would also help effectively in managing the healthcare supply chain. The evil in the international pharmaceutical industry is contaminated drugs, which means that, hence, it directly risks safety on the patients’ side. One would trace, via blockchain, the journey of a drug right from its manufacturer to its end-consumer, ensure that the drugs are not adulterated, and easily find any inadequacies in the supply chain and correct the same.
Blockchain brings innovation in the business of supply chain management more importantly. Quality, authenticity, and safety mark a product journey from the production process all through to the consumer. Blockchain can mark in real-time where a product has passed through the whole supply chain with every step recorded safely and transparently.
The food would be traced from farm to table using blockchain. Then the clients would trace the detailed history-from origin, harvest, and quality control process-at hand with a scan of the QR code of the product. Since fraud and foodborne illnesses would be eradicated as the origin of the contaminant could instantly be traced, consumer confidence will increase.
This could be through blockchain technology as applied to luxury products in the authentication purpose. More broadly, it is the marketplace that enjoys the highest rate of counterfeit of luxury products. Though harming the reputation of the brand, more products being counterfeited prove damage in themselves. Brands can assure that the product sold is of its authentic origin through blockchain technology.
In addition, it reduces inefficiencies of a supply chain by the removal of middlemen in such relationships but gives transparency and traceability. Traditionally, goods move through endless chains of middlemen, brokers, distributors, and warehouses to move forward, with all its costs and time incurred in the process. Through blockchain, cutting down such a cost smoothes processes which increase efficiency in businesses to make prices affordable to consumers.
3. Blockchain in real estate
Blockchain in real estate transforming property transactions A real property transaction is too cumbersome and time-consuming; besides, possible presence of several intermediaries like real estate agents, lawyers, or notaries at every step makes any one of the steps very expensive and time-consuming.
4. Blockchain for Voting: Ensuring the Integrity of Elections
Hence, election security and integrity is the biggest challenge that defines the digital age in contemporary times. Neither traditional voting machines nor human error could be proved to be immune to vulnerabilities in terms of cheating or tampering. Blockchain will fill this gap as it is capable of giving a secure and transparent record of votes-tamper-proof.
Then blockchain would then mean that all one had done was place their votes digitally and not on paper ballots at all. The chances of fraud or tampering would therefore be very slim since the vote has already been recorded on a blockchain hence cannot be altered. Secondly, blockchain provides a possibility for building confidence about the whole election process by creating a transparent record for all the votes that have been cast.
This would mean many more people could vote through e-voting. A safe and clear blockchain-based system would allow one to vote from anywhere on earth with the internet.
It is easier to provide more people with the right to vote.
Though still in its very nascent form of application in voting processes, a few pilot projects have been carried out. Maybe that’s one of the reasons it’s being used for securing future elections.
5. Blockchain Intellectual Property: Protection of the Creator's Rights
This would involve content directors, and other artists. Intellectual property protection scares them quite much. Blockchain will end up being the technology allowing rights registration and tracking of intellectual property securely with a proof of integrity but, at the same time, in a transparent manner. Users of Blockchain can register an explicit right and prove ownership within an immutable proof that can easily be verified by all.
The most interesting thing about smart contracts is how, for the very first time, they can literally automate payment of intellectual property royalties. Those rights holders, however, are dependent on middlemen-very often record labels or publishers-for collections and distributions of royalties; middlemen absorb huge shares of earnings and sometimes work slowly and inefficiently.
These middle tiers can be skipped directly from the remittance of the developers using blockchain and smart contracts. The smart contracts manage further real-time use of digital content; so, it can also enable or disburses royalties to that usage. In turn, the creator is much more clearly remunerated in terms of return, through the way of intellectual property rights for the work done, and that gets effective for both parties, that is, for the creator as well as for the consumer.
Future of Blockchain: Global Reach
Tomorrow it will certainly carry out applications that nobody imagined today. But now it is too early to know precisely what blockchain can do, but that it definitely can do a lot, as new use cases emerge daily. However, it stands above the rest because blockchain changes the very nature of industries and offers more transparency, more security, and more efficiency.
Obviously, it stays in the list of the problems-most importantly, with matters related to regulatory and scalability and adoption. But as more and more industries start being focused on the benefits brought about by blockchain and the technology matures, blockchain is going to be the main ingredient in economic revolutions around the world.
Conclusion
Shortly, blockchain will become the solution transforming whole industries per se, whereas today it is used as no longer only a tool for underpinning cryptocurrencies. Blockchain solutions are applied today in health care and supply chain management, full of many challenges to deploy on an enormously greater scale and in property and voting arenas.
Soon, industries will be mature enough to dig deeper into how blockchain can be applied to an even more dramatic application with revolutionary outcomes. Blockchain will end up changing and defining the new paradigm of data sharing, storage, and security.