Blockchain is so ubiquitous now that only those pushed to the sidelines of the tech world haven’t heard of it. When hearing the word blockchain, however, people think of cryptocurrency most of the time, unaware of the technology’s multiple successful applications in a variety of areas. Below, we discuss only some of blockchain’s uses.
Property Registration
Keeping blockchain-powered property registers is becoming the norm in a range of countries. Georgia is doing it already. Ukraine, the UAE, Sweden, Russia, and a set of other nations are thinking of doing it.
Authorship & Ownership
This paragraph actually relates to the preceding one. Blockchain is perfectly suitable (and currently used) for the confirmation and protection of property rights with the help of unique digital certificate-based identifiers. These also facilitate the transfer of ownership.
Authentication
Storage of any data types in a safe and transparent way can also be implemented using decentralized distributed resources. Users get to control the access to their personal data and the degree of data accessibility. There is now a capability to create digital IDs for use in a multitude of transactions involving a range of assets.
Goods Transactions
Experiments are underway to apply blockchain to trading in goods, commodities, precious metals, and diamonds. The world is seeing the emergence of a slew of services that simplify the conduct of transactions when making a whole spectrum of deals.
Loyalty Programs
Blockchain can be used in this field as well. By way of example, Singapore Airlines — one of the world’s largest — has unveiled plans to launch a blockchain wallet under a frequent-flier loyalty program. Testing has already been done, and the launch can happen any month now. Companies in all lines of business will likely offer similar solutions.
Online Voting
There are ongoing experiments to create safe and transparent anonymous-voting platforms. This approach is expected to bring about super-accurate and reliable voting outcomes, otherwise unattainable under conventional methods.
Employee Motivation
The Internet is awash with mentions of systems being developed to resolve the coordination failures of teams working on large-scale, complex projects. At the same time, each entity will be able to build flexible-customization processes to tailor blockchain to their needs.
Gambling
A set of blockchain gambling apps have been released to date (most of them Ethereum-powered). Given how fast they are gaining traction, their numbers are set to grow.
Research
NASA has recently allocated a massive grant for blockchain applications in outer space research. Blockchain is seen as having the potential to significantly improve scientists’ interaction with spacecraft.
Public & Business Administration
The bottom line: we’re convinced that in the near future, blockchain will find effective applications in a number of public administration tasks like marriage and legal entity registration, financial transactions management, etc. Businesses will actively work in that direction as well.
We’ve mentioned only a few areas that have been putting blockchain to use. Things are only starting to move that way. Where next this technology will make itself useful in coming years is anyone’s guess. The only identifiable ceiling here is the one made of developer imagination.
