7 Industries Blockchain Disrupts
By: Joel Abad, Technical Writer
Blockchain technology is becoming more and more available across industries as it helps organize data. By creating a common digital ledger for a business, blockchain makes key information easily accessible and allows employees to monitor the inner workings of the business.
The increased traceability and transparency help many businesses thrive. This is not limited to companies in the financial and technology sectors. From healthcare to higher education, from travel to real estate, many industries are benefiting from blockchain technology.
Where once blockchain and digital currencies served as instruments for speculation, they are now enabling several major industries and creating positive social impacts.
- Digital Identity
Blockchain technology makes identity information verifiable, traceable and auditable in seconds. Individuals can maintain their own profiles and control data sharing. Exhibitors can easily connect with others and verify their credentials almost instantly.
In addition to being able to associate digital identities with verifiable credentials, blockchain helps create decentralized identifiers. So you can consolidate your digital identities across different platforms into one digital identity under your control and ownership.
- Law Enforcement and Security
Lawyers can use blockchain technology to simplify and streamline transactional work, digitally sign legal contracts, and store them immutably. Smart contracts, scripted texts, and automated contract management can reduce the enormous amount of time spent preparing, personalizing, and maintaining standard legal documents. Blockchain also democratizes access to the justice system by reducing consumer complexity and reducing high legal fees.
Most manual tasks can be performed automatically, greatly reducing the time it takes to draft and revise legal documents. These costs are usually passed on to the client, driving up legal fees to astronomical heights. The introduction of smart contracts speeds up transactions between parties and reduces costs.
There are several possible blockchain applications across the legal industry. Some of the top use cases are intellectual property, property rights, electronic signatures, blockchain-based arbitration systems, automated regulatory compliance, the chain of custody, and others.
- Banking and Finance
The number of how much of a given developing country's total GDP comes from remittances is pretty clear. Haiti accounts for about 29% of the total GDP and is one of the countries with the highest remittance-to-GDP ratio in the world.
It is just over 10% in the Philippines and 2.7% in Mexico. To put it into perspective, remittances account for 0.7% of the GDP worldwide each year. And that's a huge amount of money.
Wire transfer is one of the most inconvenient transactions for consumers. Long turnaround times, high fees, security risks, and a general lack of transparency make blockchain adoption ripe for its role.
Blockchain in the remittance sector uses an encrypted distributed ledger to enable reliable real-time transaction verification without the use of intermediaries such as correspondent banks. This means both senders and receivers have full transparency with minimal fees.
- Travel
The travel industry relies on various companies sharing information with each other. For example, travel agencies need to share customer data with airlines and hotels, while the personal belongings of travelers are often shared and tracked between companies. Blockchain can make accessing and storing important information easier and more reliable because storage responsibilities are shared across the network.
Financial transactions are also an important part of the travel industry, and blockchain technology has the ability not only to simplify payment systems but also to protect them. This applies especially to foreign payments. As a result, blockchain has the potential to improve trust between all parties.
- Media
Blockchain technology can track the lifecycle of any asset, thus protecting digital content, reducing intellectual property piracy, and facilitating the distribution of authentic digital collections.
A large number of unverified or fake content can cost creators and artists around the world a lot of money. Use cases for blockchain in media to prevent piracy are beginning to emerge. It is already being applied on a small scale through a variety of means, from facilitating content surveillance to implementing forensic watermarking techniques.
Ledger technology can support the production of new content by giving content creators more control over their production. Blockchain allows actors, journalists, and musicians to easily track and monetize their content.
The elimination of centralized third-party providers like YouTube is imminent. It means that all artists will earn much more than they currently do under a centralized media and entertainment production system.
- Real Estate
Real estate technology has traditionally been primarily concerned with offers and connecting buyers and sellers. However, blockchain is opening up new avenues for real estate transactions and could enable trading platforms and online marketplaces to support real estate transactions more comprehensively.
Blockchain helps secure data sharing, streamlines rental income and payments to property owners, and provides best-in-class due diligence across portfolios. This improves operational efficiency and saves time and money.
Blockchain Real Estate Companies
- Republic
- SafeWire
- Vairt
- Government
Governments around the globe are taking advantage of blockchain to build trust, improve accountability and responsiveness, increase efficiency and transparency, reduce costs, improve service delivery, and enable high-performing governments with a more secure, agile, and cost-effective structure.
Countries such as Sweden and Georgia are already experimenting with blockchain-based land registries that allow third parties to store copies of property records. This will bring much-needed transparency to land tenure, facilitate the resolution of property disputes, and increase public trust.
Blockchain-based government has the potential to solve the pain points of the past and get the following benefits:
- Secure storage of citizen, business, and government data
- Increased trust in government and online civil systems
- Reduced potential for corruption and abuse
- Reduced time-consuming processes
- Reduced costs associated with managing accountability
Given these industries and other sectors (e.g., higher education, transportation, stock trading, hospitality, etc.) that blockchain technology is continuously disrupting, it is very likely that it is here to stay. Its impact on the world will continue to grow as technology advances.
Sources:
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/industries-disrupted-blockchain/
https://101blockchains.com/blockchain-impact-on-digital-identity/
https://consensys.net/blockchain-use-cases/law/
https://consensys.net/blockchain-use-cases/government-and-the-public-sector/
https://youteam.io/blog/10-use-cases-of-blockchain-technology-in-banking/
https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/blockchain-in-remittance-and-money-transfer-services
https://consensys.net/blockchain-use-cases/media-and-entertainment/
To enable comments sign up for a Disqus account and enter your Disqus shortname in the Articulate node settings.
