How Blockchain Technology Will Disrupt Business

Person holding a credit card and accessing a secure blockchain

Blockchain development is a technology that gained great traction in 2019, and it should continue unabated in 2020. Blockchain is a growing list of records that are referred to as blocks. Each one has a cryptographic hash on it of the previous block. They also have transaction data and a timestamp.

Essentially, blockchain is a distributed, decentralized public ledger. The security factor has made it popular in finance applications—indeed, blockchain is probably known best as the record-keeping technology behind Bitcoin.

But there’s more to blockchain’s prospects than finance. Blockchain stands to be a disruptor in the business world because it has potential applications in so many different fields.

In 2019, Deloitte conducted a blockchain survey across a dozen countries. Attitudes toward blockchain have strengthened, with 53% of those surveyed said that they considered blockchain technology a critical priority for their organization. That was up 10 percentage points from the prior year.

Blockchain applications can provide business benefits in security, data encryption, transparency, protection, better collaboration, faster traceability, and improved operations, so it’s no surprise that more businesses are finding compelling use cases for the technology. Here are seven industries where blockchain has good potential to be applied.

7 Notable Industry Blockchain Use Cases

  • Banking and finance: As mentioned above, this is so far the main application for blockchain, but it has the potential to further disrupt the commercial banking industry by providing a peer-to-peer payment system with higher security and lower fees
  • Security: Blockchain opportunities allow companies to feel safer in their various transactions due to the blocks’ ability to be distributed but not copied, so application cases having to do with security are among the most common these days
  • Health care: Hospitals, patients, and other users can use blockchain in medicine to safely access crucial network information. This encryption is useful also for conducting clinical trials and health care research and management of the drug supply chain, as all parties can access the vast amount of data quickly while data changes can be hidden, with virtually no chance of sensitive data being compromised
  • Energy market: A blockchain app could decentralize the energy market by allowing for the smart metering of electricity generated through solar panels owned privately. These individuals could use blockchain to record, trade, and settle their affairs via ledgers
  • Education: The benefits of blockchain in this area include the management of verification procedures, helping to reduce fake claims of unearned educational credits
  • Real estate: Blockchain could guard against possible fraud, reduce the need for paperwork, and check for errors in public records
  • Media and entertainment: Blockchain development in this area could be used to decentralize video infrastructure, allowing video encoding, storage, and distribution costs to drop dramatically

There are useful blockchain solutions across many different industries. Pull ahead of your competitors with the right blockchain solution for your business.

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