Insolar Blockchain Use Cases
Ever since its invention, blockchain has been claimed by its evangelists as a disruptive technology that will change the way the world works. But after 10 years hence, in spite of its unparalleled benefits, blockchain has failed to mainstream adoption. One of the primary reasons for the failure of blockchain frameworks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, that has hindered the mass adoption of these technologies, is that the conventional centralized systems have more to offer than decentralized blockchain systems.
In response to the low adoption of blockchain, researcher and developers identified a trilemma comprising of decentralization, speed, and security which accurately maps the problems with the current blockchain frameworks. Therefore, to tackle speed and security problems, private chains were introduced. Hyperledger fabric is one such technology that is used to create a permissioned network of stakeholders that share a ledger of records among them. Although, Hyperledger fabric was an improvement in terms of speed and security but didn’t support the level decentralization and public participation like the rest of the systems.
Meet Insolar
Insolar is the next iteration of the blockchain evolution. Unlike bitcoin, Ethereum or EOS, which are designed for public consumption, Insolar is built from the ground up with businesses and the way businesses interact with the public in mind. And hence, Insolar removes all the errors and discrepancies with the previous blockchain systems and reinvents the way the businesses exploit DLTs.
Use cases
Following are some of the use cases where Insolar offers significant improvement compared to other blockchain frameworks:
Supply Chain and Logistics
Blockchain in supply chain and logistics have been previously used by Ethereum to record the history of changes in a product and verify the changes using a smart contract. Hyperledger, however, changed this process by introducing a permissioned network. But Insolar takes supply chain management on blockchain to the next level by providing private-public interoperability where the product creator and modifiers could be in a private network and customers in a public network who have the power to verify those products themselves. Since Insolar uses the concept of domains, every member of the network do not have to verify the changes and each stakeholder can define its own policy for verification and management. Insolar also offers data security by using data encryption techniques to secure confidential data. In contrast to Ethereum and Hyperledger, nodes in the network can choose their roles. Therefore, information about the products and its changes can be stored in separately in nodes with storage roles and nodes with verification roles respectively. As a result, nodes do have to go through the burden of downloading and maintaining terabytes of blockchain data in their hard drives.
Manufacturing
By combining 3D printing and distributed manufacturing, blockchain can revolutionize the manufacturing sector and save millions of dollars which are wasted due to the inefficient process. Apart from building trust among multiple stakeholders in manufacturing sector blockchain solves the problems such as plagiarism, theft, high costs, and low speed. Firstly, Insolar counters this problem of plagiarism and theft by hiding data in the transactions to offer data security. Since the number of transactions in the manufacturing sector could increase with the number of products generated, Insolar saves the day with its 19000+ transactions/sec speed in contrast to Ethereum’s 15 transactions per second. Moreover, to enable distributed manufacturing, companies need distributed applications, Insolar provides the support to write smart contracts that are embedded, use low data storage and are cheaper than other blockchain frameworks.
Retail
Some of the questions that arise in this use case regarding product tracking, fraud prevention, loyalty point management, privacy, and hassle-free processing can be answered by Insolar. The multi-ledgered system of Insolar makes it possible to handle the gamut of transactions to track products, verify its origin and changes in history. Secondly, fraud in blockchain systems is likely unlikely to occur, solely because of the consensus algorithms that are used for block generation and verification, Insolar reinvents this concept by allowing users to choose a consensus algorithm. Furthermore, to manage the payments and data of customers, Insolar provides support for distributed applications written in golang, these applications or smart contracts not only secure the data in an encrypted format but also use policies which can prevent malicious nodes from calling the functions in the smart contracts. Lastly, smart contract in Insolar can also be used to create utility tokens which ease the processes in loyalty point management. On top of this, 19000+ transactions per second rate streamline the payments and provide customer satisfaction.
Energy and Utility
Multiple startups have utilized the blockchain technology to enable p2p exchange of power. Trade of electricity over blockchain happens when a producer supplies power back to the grid and the smart meter creates a token in using a smart contract for the transferred power, the consumer purchases the token and hence the now owns the right to extract power from the grid. This business model though works well has been undermined by the existing systems. Likely because Ethereum has been majorly used in the case to create token and integrate it with the smart meters. One the drawback with this system of decentralized power exchange is the unnecessary wastage of storage, processing power, and bandwidth. Suppose a person living in London, created a transaction by purchasing power using an Ethereum Dapp and a person living 6000 miles away in Thailand, who would never be using that power or utility token, is using her machine to mine this transaction. As unreasonable as this sounds, it is also inefficient and costly. Instead, only those nodes should verify this transaction who possess the possibility to ever use this power or the tokens. Insolar, evidently, can solve this problem by introducing Globulas, which is a cluster of nodes that share common configurations and characteristics. Since the electric grids aren’t any larger than the national coverage area, each state can have its own Globula for statewide power exchange and for the national exchange where transactions power from producer in one state is sold to a consumer in other, InterGlobula Network Protocol can be used which would reduce the verification time and overhead costs.
Conclusion
Advancement in blockchain can present efficient and scalable solutions across multiple sectors and each sector can utilize the power of blockchain in their own particular way. Insolar blockchain platform has the potential to revolutionize these sectors and lead the blockchain race in business with its innovative benefits. The aforementioned sectors are just a few popular uses cases, Insolar has the capability to be extended across multiple discrete Industries.
