What Blockchain Is Going to Change in Your Business Tomorrow

6 min readJan 9, 2019

This article was delivered to you by OpenLedger, a blockchain development company.

There’s plenty of hype and mystery surrounding blockchain technology, but a recent survey of over 1000 worldwide executives revealed that 84% believe it is widely scalable and will eventually achieve worldwide adoption. The survey also found that in the next calendar year 39% of firms plan to invest over $5 million in blockchain capabilities and 65% plan to spend over $1 million.

From finance to marketing to healthcare, there’s not an industry that will not be impacted by the upcoming inflow of blockchain-based solutions. Let’s take a look at some ways blockchain can help businesses gear up for tomorrow.

Transparency

Whether it’s tracing a financial transaction record or looking up the shipping history of a particular product, transparency is key for efficient data checks.

Blockchain’s very architecture, where each node of the network stores a copy of the transaction ledger, means that every user always has a copy of the full record.

In supply chain, for instance, you can imagine that a product can be tracked from an IoT-enabled manufacturing system to a blockchain-based supply chain management platform all the way to a blockchain payment app used by the customer to purchase the product.

Stored right within the code of those blocks will be the record of manufacture, origin, conditions throughout the shipping process (think temperature in shipping containers, for instance), right down to the time spent on warehouse shelves. The amount of information recorded about a product, transaction or even a person will grow, and access to that information (given the proper permission) can be granted to anyone on the network.

With financial transactions, there will be a clear record of who, how and when for every bank transfer, trade, loan or other activity. Key information about that transaction will be stored right in the code.

For healthcare, patient history and data will follow the patient instead of sitting in a folder in a doctor’s office, which at some point can be a matter of life and death for the patient. And now all this critical information will be available to doctors based on key safeguards and rules built into the systems.

Speed of Transactions

Another key benefit of blockchain systems is the increased speed of transactions.

Currently, settling financial trades between banking institutions can take days. With advanced blockchain systems, this has already been cut down to hours, and will be cut down to seconds in the future.

There is a cost-saving to that speed as well: with less personnel needed to verify transactions and less time lost while waiting for transfers to complete before moving forward with projects or purchases.

Think of the claims process for insurance companies, for example. Currently, it’s very labor-intensive to handle the review and approval of claims, and to verify regulatory compliance. All of these mechanisms can be built right into the blockchain system, greatly enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of these disciplines.

As they say, time is money, so faster transaction times across a wide range of industries means savings and increased profits.

“So, if you look at blockchain… I think the banks are really working on this now because the potential is so huge. And if the top five, six global banks would put their minds to it and agree on a standard, you could force (that) standard onto the globe.
And I think that you can actually then get to a timeframe of five or six years in which this will work.”
Ralph Hamers, chief executive of ING Group
Source

Security

The whole point of a decentralized system like blockchain is that no central company or authority needs to be involved in the verification of any transaction that happens within the network. A set group of users must agree for a transaction to be recorded, and a large pool of users store a current copy of the transaction ledger.

This dramatically increases the security of systems, from financial markets to payment methods.

Theft and fraud become almost impossible, as a wide range of disparate systems must be ‘hacked’ to insert a fraudulent transaction.

Advanced identity protection systems can be created using blockchain, protecting personal information and resources from corruption. Instead of having to share that sensitive data to prove your identity, a blockchain-based identity system could verify identity securely through a protected digital identity stored on the blockchain.

Automation

Some estimates claiming millions of jobs will be replaced in the coming decades due to automation.

AI and blockchain are going to be a critical part of the shift in how work gets done.

Beyond powering and protecting the AI that can be used to facilitate automated processes, smart contracts can ensure that systems behave and conform to rules built right into the system.

Smart contracts put rules for transactions and processes right into the code of the blockchain, meaning that fraudulent activity or actions outside of pre-designed parameters become impossible. Unless a consensus is reached among a required number of users on the blockchain, a process or transaction can’t go forward.

This opens the possibility for automated software development, data analysis, and even automated organizations, or DAO’s (Distributed Automated Organizations). Sometime in the future, entire organizational structures can be programmed into the code of the blockchain, allowing for decision-making at the process level, without human intervention.

The DAO concept might seem a bit too far out there, but smart contracts do allow pre-planned rules to be built into organizations, so that progress is only possible when stakeholders all approve of the next step. This partial automation will be the stepping stone needed to get to DAOs in the future.

Decentralization

Increasingly, people are realizing they have less power than they think over institutions that exert central control over their resources or activities. The decentralization that blockchain creates means that authority moves back toward the people, or in this case, the users of a given blockchain platform.

One key civic application that has been touted as a perfect application for blockchain is voting. In fact, in the recent US midterm election, the State of West Virginia debuted a blockchain-based voting app for absentee or overseas voters.

The security, identity and transparency benefits of the blockchain mean that voting power can be confidently held by populations. Building trust in institutions by decentralizing them will be a major benefit on the blockchain ecosystem.

Putting security and transparency back into the hands of the population can actually transform how people interact with governments. At the same time, information shared on social media and news can all be verified and secured in a way that the blockchain system users agree upon.

Disruption Is the Future

The single biggest buzzword you hear in the tech industry is disruption. Everyone is talking about it, but blockchain is really poised to create it. The fundamental change from a central ledger based on a single authority to a distributed system will transform how we do business across every single industry.

From transparency to data integrity to speed of transactions to automated processes, there are many things that will change about the way we do business in the future. Whether it be tracking a product through a supply chain or quickly transfering money across international borders, efficiency will increase along with security. That is the power of blockchain, and a peek into the not-so-distant future.