Use Cases of Blockchain Tech Application in Business Domains
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The purpose of the post is to collect use cases / examples for blockchain solutions in different field. Thus making them it easier to research and refer to. Will be constantly updated.
- Blockchain for Insurance
- Blockchain for Digital Rights
- Blockchain for Internet-of-Things
- Blockchain for Medical Records
- Blockchain for Banking
- Blockchain for Legal & Regtech
- Blockchain for e-Tickets
Blockchain for Insurance
- Dynamis — provides peer-to-peer unemployment insurance
- Lemonade — first peer-to-peer insurance company. Specialising in property and casualty insurance
- InsurEth — blockchain-based travel delay insurance
- Teambrella — lets users form “teams” that effectively insure each other
Blockchain for Digital rights
- Blockphase — decentralized blockchain-based digital content distribution and management platform for virtual reality and 360 video creators.
- ContentKid – digital media platform where consumers can access and pay for short-lived subscriptions to any participating digital provider’s premium content (entertainment, news, gaming, information, etc.) via one account / password, and one secure place for their bank/credit-card/PayPal account information.
- Cognate is a blockchain-based common law trademark registry. Common law trademarks refer to the use of a mark in commerce, and are normally upheld without the need for a more expensive, federally-registered trademark.
- Binded lets image creators claim their copyrights on the blockchain and protect them for free.
- Ujo Music – platform for licensing and music distribution, with storage, payments and artist ID.
Blockchain for Internet-of-Things
Blockchains can also be used to create distributed contracts which can be used for keeping track of IOT devices, which were the main weapons used in a DDoS attack, and hence it can be seen as a step towards making the internet a secure place for everyone.
- SITA Creates Distributed Drone Registry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQWMrp-6Ds
- Chain of Things integrates two of the most disruptive technologies in order to help solve real world issues. Chain of things is working to establish a link between the IoT and blockchain technology for the purpose of increasing efficiency and reducing fraud.
- Flow Chain — a distributed ledger for peer-to-peer IoT networks and real-time data transactions
Blockchain for Medical Records
In healthcare/IT domain one of the urgent questions is how to share more medical data with more stakeholders for more purposes, all while ensuring data integrity and protecting patient privacy. Today humans manually attempt to reconcile medical data among clinics, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, and insurance companies. It does not work well because there is no single list of all the places data can be found or the order in which it was entered.
In healthcare, blockchain could provide a secure yet transparent record of who has shared health data with whom, while protecting the details of the data itself. While this is undoubtedly a valuable piece of the privacy puzzle, blockchain is premised on mathematically derived pseudonyms for distributed ledger verification and the HIPAA Privacy Rule prohibits use of mathematically-derived pseudonyms because of potential re-identification of de-identified protected health information (PHI). This limitation on the use of mathematically-derived pseudonyms as re-identification codes for de-identified information effectively makes blockchain non-HIPAA compliant.
While there’re still few challenges, a lot of research and some implementation is in the place:
- MedRec by MIT — Prototype system for storing and sharing universal medical data. It proposes a Data-as-a-mining-incentive, possible answer for a pressing need in the medical research community while sustaining and securing the medical record authentication log via blockchain Proof of Work.
- Google Deep Mind Health is doing partnership with London’s Royal Free Hospital to develop kidney monitoring software called Streams
- Patientory is a startup that’s urging citizens around the globe to unlock their health data with blockchain.
- Gem’s has partnered with Philips to use blockchain technology to support a patient-centric approach to healthcare.
- Australian startup Brontech created the healthcare platform Cyph with blockchain. The platform will be used to build secure digital identities for healthcare providers to communicate private information safely.
- Pokitdok aims to change how healthcare stakeholders communicate by giving customers access to technology that will connect healthcare’s fragmented silos. The system offers payers, health systems and technology companies seamless communication.
Blockchain for Banking
One of the major use cases is the interbank/international payments. Blockchain provides an alternative to the existent SWIFT system, decreasing the time and increasing the speed of transactions. Some of companies specialize on the technology for banks, like
Others replace the banks by their services
Cryptocurrencies aren’t the best payment method for usual services because of their volatility and liquidity issues. So there’s a place for services that are taking coins closer to the everyday use
- cryptopay.me is the UK company that provides you with the Bitcoin debit card
- tenX — is a company from Singapore allowing you to pay a wide range of altcoins besides BTC via card
Another point is that ~1–2bln people don’t have access to the banks, some companies are thinking about providing the bank services to this group like atlas.money
Blockchain for Legal & Regtech
Regulatory tech (RegTech) has became a trend and the next domain after (or in support of) financial technologies. Legal expenditures are rising dramatically, as well as number of regulations that slow down business. Also there’s more pressure to comply as with recent example of Google fined record €2.4bn by EU over search engine results. Hope is that technology can ease and improve situation.
Here are some numbers on the market size:
- Legal US Market is $437bn (source)
- Over 3bn is spent on legal technology, mostly for e-billing and matter management (source)
- Financial institutions in the US alone have paid more than $160bn in fines for non-compliance. $2.2bn spent by London-based HSBC on regulation and compliance in the first nine months of 2015, up 33% YoY (source)
- The global demand for regulatory, compliance and governance software is expected to reach $118.7bn by 2020 (source)
Development in the corporate sector
Blockchain is used for database access that’s securely encrypted and easily auditable.
- Support of Know your customer (KYC) & Anti Money Laundering (AML) (example: KYC3)
- Shareholders disclosure obligations, investment restrictions in various jurisdictions (example: Fundapps)
- Personal data & privacy policies (example: Privitar)
- Anti-fraud surveillance and risk analysis
- Notary and intellectual property rights registry
- HR / Employment law
- Dispute handling
Blockchain for e-Tickets
Recently one of my friends tried to book the tickets to the Ed Sheeran’s concert in the mid 2018’s. At the midnight, the moment the sales started, she tried to purchase them online and found herself as 1000'th-something in the queue. Even with that effort she couldn’t buy the ticket. So in our blockchain research we started to look if there’s a solution to such a problem.
Benefits
The outlined benefits to the ticket issuers are mostly in increased profit from:
- allowing distribution by any party — e.g. booking website, agency, regular people
- smarter ticket pricing
- getting fair commission from all sales on secondary market
- preventing fraud
- immediate payouts
For the customers it will bring better prices, availability and easy resale if needed.
Event tickects
Initial search have found next startups working in this direction:
- citizenticket.co.uk — working in UK, web-ios-android app available
- hellosugoi.com — serving some US customers
- blockets — API Platform, Holland-based
- guts.tickets — concept, doing ICO, Holland-based
- aventus.io — concept, doing ICO
- blocktix.io — concept, doing ICO
- ticketchain.ie — concept, no release date announced
- upgraded-inc.com — concept, no release date announced
- lavamovement.com — concept, no release date announced
Overall e-ticketing space is pretty crowded, there’s a couple of big players like Eventbrite or Stubhub. Maybe they will also take a role in the blockchain transformation.
