How Boeing, Toyota, Caterpillar, and other OEMs can double their current net profit by using smart contracts to become unmanned “virtual companies”, with or without cryptocurrency: Part 10
What is the best path forward, what are the action steps, and what is the roadmap?
Any company seeking to adopt smart contracts and work towards becoming a “virtual company” should start by either hiring a team of Solidity developers and subject matter experts to create the core infrastructure and features described throughout this whitepaper or partnering with a 3rd party company with smart contracts expertise to achieve the same end. In most cases, “buying” is a more realistic option than “building”. They should also begin conducting pilots, trials, etc. with their suppliers and emphasize the benefits to both parties. Key personnel (CFOs, commodity managers, engineers, etc.) should undergo blockchain-specific IT security training that covers private key retention and the proper, safe channels for interacting with a smart contract.
From there, four possibilities arise:
1. Ethereum stabilizes to the US dollar and becomes usable as a global payments currency (scenario 3 in part 8). This is by far the most convenient and streamlined outcome. Smart contracts and payments execution could both be on-chain. Domestic and global payments could both be handled in the same exact way.
2. A different smart contracts-oriented cryptocurrency that is backwards-compatible with Ethereum manages to stabilize to the US dollar (i.e. Qtum, Cardano). Then it’s a simple matter to migrate the Solidity contracts over to the new blockchain.
3. No stablecoin emerges but open banking APIs do become the global standard (for the many incentives discussed in scenario 2 of part 8) and most the world becomes like the EU village is now; people in different countries could send money to each other as though they were in the same country. Still not quite as fast as cryptocurrency, but closer. In this case, we’d go with the scenario described in the latter half of part 9. Smart contracts are still on the Ethereum network, but transactions (now no different for domestic vs international) happen off-chain in fiat.
4. The current state of things never changes. No stablecoin ever emerges and open banking APIs somehow do not become the standard outside of Europe. Still wouldn’t be that bad, there’d be enough Japanese and American banks to partner with.
In which case, transactions will be something like this:
While this is the least efficient scenario of the four, it’s still greatly advantageous over the current way highly globalized supply chains are managed. Automated smart contracts instead of manual invoicing. Local currency → Crypto → Local currency instead of traditional correspondent banking (SWIFT).
Continue to part 11….