Distributed Ledger Technology has been touted as a major potential disruption for the insurance industry. Highly secure, externally connected self executing digital agreements could potentially save the industry billions in costs, fraud and other overheads.
Apart from major issues such as connectivity to external data & scalability, both of which have been discussed in the community in great detail and now solved, there are a couple of other issues that came to me as I prepared my submission for the Honeycomb Smart Contract Hackathon.
Issue 1 - Data Availability & Frequency
The ability for a Smart Contract to access external data is extremely important for them to be useful for anything other than moving around tokens. Thankfully, we have now have good solutions to this problem thanks to networks such as Chainlink. With the use of a decentralized Oracle network, we can use multiple data sources & Oracle nodes to ensure data consistency and integrity by the time it reaches the Smart Contract. But this alone isn’t enough to ensure the Smart Contract can’t still be ‘gamed’. …
When it comes to Blockchain & Distributed Ledger platforms in 2019, there are so many options. For an enterprise or consortium of businesses, it can be quite daunting and confusing to delve into the world of blockchain and DLT, with so many platforms available to look into, all offering a range of different features. From things like security, privacy, consensus mechanisms, access control, and economical models, its no wonder why there is such a large barrier to adoption. …
Here we are in 2019, 10 years after the birth of the first Blockchain (Bitcoin). There are a number of identified use cases for blockchain being currently being investigated and implemented, and a number of these have even gained real traction and are now being used in Production environments. The most popular non cryptocurrency use case by far has been ‘track and trace’ type scenarios, where a blockchain provides a shared, immutable, single source of truth for some kind of data or entities that go through multiple steps or hops in their life cycle, with each step of the process being added to the distributed ledger potentially by multiple parties. …
It’s no doubt that smart contracts are arguably the most revolutionary innovation that has come from distributed ledger (blockchain) technology. The ability for a trustworthy, self executing, tamper proof digital agreement to be deployed and executed on a distributed ledger has a multitude of potential use cases that span across almost all industries and verticals, from finance and insurance all the way to retail operations and civil government systems. So why aren’t they being used much yet?
The concept of a Smart Contract executing on a distributed ledger has been touted as a cure for many of the problems associated with traditional contracts and digital financial agreements, which are simply not geared up for the digital age. This is because Smart Contracts are highly secure, tamper proof digital agreements that provide guaranteed execution and processing in a trustless manner. This is a huge shift in the way that digital agreements work today, which often rely on distrusted third parties, data duplication and high cost business processes. …
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