Blockchain Beyond Crypto
Block #1 : Blockchain for business and beyond
Whenever people hear about the term ‘blockchain’ it is directly related to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Blockchain is the underlying technology that enables cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, litecoin, ether, etc. But the potential of blockchain is not limited to just digital currencies. There are many use cases where the distributed ledger technology can be applied to improve business processes.
Just to get this out of the way, blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. It fosters a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust, accountability, and transparency from contracts to deeds to payments.
Finance is often considered the first industry that blockchain will completely disrupt. However, with any emerging technology, common adoption can be slow as organizations seek to understand and implement it properly. Developed by J.P. Morgan, Quorum is one of the first major steps towards the common adoption of blockchain among financial industries. Quorum is an enterprise-focused, permissioned blockchain infrastructure specifically designed for financial use cases.
Another application of the ledger technology could be improving food safety. A second problem that plagues the industry is food fraud. Commonly faked, diluted, or adulterated foods include olive oil, fish, milk, grains, honey, coffee and tea, spices, fruit juice, and organic produce. With a list like that, it’s almost harder to name items that aren’t regularly spoofed. If consumers know that they’re likely paying for something that isn’t genuine, they may no longer be willing to fork over top dollar for premium products. On the other hand, if companies made the supply chain more transparent and accessible to their customers — showed them where their food came from and where it has been — perhaps consumer trust would be restored.
Walmart and IBM have been working on making this transparent supply chain a reality. A software that uses the blockchain to track products through its supply chain, from the farm to the consumer, in the hopes of addressing those issues.
One very interesting use case is applying this to the energy industry. Powerledger is an ethereum based blockchain that focuses on enabling trading methods for users to buy and sell clean energy. It enables users to sell their surplus energy to other users who are willing to buy it. Operations of this blockchain have been going on in Perth, Australia since one year and they have plans to start in India. The biggest advantage of a renewable energy based system is that you do not need very large infrastructure to get started. All those wires and electric towers are not required. Villages or faraway towns that are isolated from the electric grid can start their own microgrid and generate electricity using renewable energy sources such as solar, wind etc. This has great potential in countries like Australia, India and pretty much the Indian subcontinent, where it is sunny for the majority of the year and there are a large number of areas that are still not connected to the electric grid.
Another interesting application of the blockchain technology is a trading system for carbon credits. Carbon offsetting means compensating for the carbon-dioxide pollution you’re making (your carbon footprint) by preventing the same amount of pollution from happening somewhere else. Afforestation, carbon sequestration, carbon capture are some processes that can take carbon out of the environment. But the entities doing these tasks do not get significant returns since there’s no system for accounting the amount of carbon sequestered. Also, this carbon could be used to offset the emissions from companies that release carbon into the atmosphere. A blockchain based system could be used to keep track of emission of companies and prompt them to buy offsets if they go above a certain limit. A distributed, immutable system would ensure that the system cannot be gamed. This is one use case which I’ve been working on since the past few months.
Most businesses are wary about sharing their data. A solution to this is using a permissioned blockchain system that allows for a layered access system, where rules can be decided on how users can view and edit data. Hyperledger Fabric is one such blockchain that enables this.
So how can someone get started with blockchain development? Well, it’s not very complicated. Almost all technologies are open source and have very good documentation provided to get anyone started. Also, online communities on projects are very active and are always ready to help.
If you wish to get started building Distributed Applications( Dapps) on a public blockchain , the Ethereum docs are the best place to get started.
For a permissioned blockchain, the hyperledger project has a number of different offerings. The most popular is Hyperledger Fabric. The language used primarily is Go, but there is now support for Java and Node JS also. Hyperledger Composer is a tool that can be used to build smart contracts, business logic and business networks using Node JS( which is a little easier than Go).
Just to remind you that blockchain is not a panacea. But there are many scenarios that can benefit from this technology in the near future and its utility is not restricted to just creating cryptocurrencies.
On a lighter note….
