35 Blockchain Use Cases Making an Impact Today

Blockchain may still be discussed as a hot new topic by many, but it is already embedded in many real-world applications. In manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, transport, farming, food production, and more, the list is long and continues to grow. Distributed Ledger Technology is a tool not only for secure, decentralised transactions, but also for greater speed and efficiency. It seems there is no limit to the diversity of use cases.

Both the public and private sectors are pushing for greater use of blockchain. As blockchain permeates different areas of activity, an increasingly large part of the economy is linked to it. By 2025, as much as one-tenth of global GDP (the sum of the gross domestic products of all the countries) could be driven by blockchain. This estimate from the World Economic Forum is a wakeup call to businesses and organisations across the world.

Blockchain offers at least four fundamental qualities of interest. They are immutability, security, transparency, and resilience. After an initial period of educating the market about the potential, blockchain implementation is now ramping up. Blockchain technology could have as big an effect on the way we handle trust and value, as the Internet has had on the way we deal with information. Below, we discuss 35 cases of blockchain driving real solutions across the world.

Land Titles

Transparency and the fight against fraud are two key motivations for the government of Georgia (that’s the country, not the US state) to use blockchain for its land registry. The purpose-built system works in tandem with the digital records managed by the National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR).

Start-Up Compute Resources

Digital Currency Group has blockchain and start-up investment roots stretching way back (in Bitcoin years, at least). In 2016 the company partnered with Amazon Web Services to make a platform for other companies to experiment with blockchain technologies.

Mobile Transactions

Blockchain’s potential for streamlining banking operations is no secret. Ripple is a leader in blockchain technology adapted for financial transactions and now the platform for a group of Japanese banks to make mobile payments flow better. Service launch is programmed for Q4 2018.

Border Control

Eurostar train passengers moving between London and Amsterdam must currently go through border checks several times. A blockchain alternative is under discussion with the Dutch government to store passenger information in a secure, tamperproof way and make Dutch border control input audit-able by British agencies.

Medical Records Management

Bringing together disconnected pockets of data is a general use case for blockchain. It is especially relevant in healthcare, where copies of medical records can otherwise get out of date as patients move between different establishments. MedRec is one example of the use of blockchain to share up-to-date patient data securely, confidentially, and only between authenticated caregivers.

Harmonising Healthcare Data

Electronic healthcare records and systems hold considerable promise for improving patient care and streamlining healthcare activities. However, incompatible EHR software applications have sometimes created even more data silos than before. Proprietary packages have led to records being kept in centralised, on-site installations, where they are at higher risk from cyberattacks. These fragile, vulnerable configurations are at odds with the life or death nature of many healthcare situations. A solution is being developed to address these issues by storing patient data on a blockchain system for faster, more reliable, more accessible use by authorised caregivers across geographical borders. Data then becomes reliable through synchronisation across the blockchain, while still being secure and confidential.

Performing Arts

Blockchain also has a positive economic impact for many buyers and sellers by allowing them to avoid the use and therefore payment of intermediaries. The arts and music especially can benefit from this new business model, allowing artists to receive higher compensation for their work. Former drummer for Guns N Roses, Matt Sorum is a leading figure in the Artbit blockchain project to help musicians make a better living from their output. Singer-songwriter (and record producer and audio engineer) Imogen Heap has also started to licence her work via blockchain.

Carbon Tracking

A greener planet while helping enterprises offset their consumption of energy is a step in the right direction for China, thanks to blockchain-based carbon credit tracking. This initiative dates from March 2017 when IBM and Energy-Blockchain Labs launched a solution to record emissions and facilitate carbon asset trading between Chinese companies.

Food Safety

Blockchain really comes into its own when used in a context where many independent parties must work together fairly and efficiently. Supply chains are prime examples, especially in the food industry where constant, audit-able tracking is required to maintain food quality. In China, IBM joined forces with Walmart and Fortune 500 firm JD.com to create the Blockchain Food Safety Alliance. The aim of the alliance is to facilitate checks that food quality is being maintained and to allow sources, processing, and distribution to be tracked for food safety at all stages.

E-Government

“Of the people, by the people, for the people”. Abraham Lincoln might not have had blockchain in mind, but his words seem prescient enough. Storing public records immutably and transparently for the benefit of a country’s citizens is a natural application of the decentralised technology of blockchain. In Finland for example, the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners has been developing an e-government pilot for people to access records. Educational records and voting are further possible applications.

Waste Handling

Intelligent waste management is good for the planet and helps increase operational efficiency as well as improving use of resources. Waltonchain uses RFID technology to track products as they are being made and distributed. Data from each step and for each article , including waste levels, can then be recorded on a blockchain as in this smart waste management project in China.

Residency Records

Authentication through immutable blockchain records is a fast track to voting eligibility for residents in Zug, Switzerland. Also called ‘Crypto Valley’ because of its large number of crypto and blockchain start-ups, the town has partnered with Uport in a blockchain project to register the ID of all residents to authorise them to vote online.

Commodity Tracking

A first in world trade, an agricultural commodity blockchain now exists for the sales of soybeans to China. Food trading company Louis Dreyfus Co. initiated the system with banks from France and the Netherlands to accelerate soybeans transactions with Chinese customers, offering a faster alternative to slower traditional processes.

Gem Tracking

Premier diamond company, the De Beers Group is directly concerned by questions about the ethical sourcing of these precious stones. An unfalsifiable, permanent, auditable record of where diamonds have come from and where they go is a way of proving good corporate behaviour and fair trading. A blockchain to track diamonds is a natural fit, with a “digital record for every diamond registered on the platform”. If a diamond is forever, so is a blockchain record of that diamond.

Art Acquisition and Ownership

Proving veritable ownership of a piece of art can be tough, especially after it has been the object of multiple sales and resales, not always well-documented. By registering art on a blockchain, its provenance and ownership can be definitively established. Subsequent transactions of the same piece of art can be recorded in the same way, leaving an unalterable trail of information tracing each interim ownership up to the latest acquirer. The works of art can remain in secure storage before and after a new acquisition is logged on the blockchain, protecting the artefact as well as the transaction.

Solar Power and Heating

Data on solar power can be used to calculate the electricity generated, water heated, and consumption of both for billing afterwards. Blockchain is an ideal repository for such data, which it stores immutably with protection against falsification. Fremantle in Australia is home to a project using blockchain for solar energy records, while in New York, blockchain powers neighbourhood solar power micro-grid run by and for its users.

National Energy Supply

In Chile, the National Energy Commission is stealing a march on modernisation by using blockchain for Chilean energy usage. With an added advantage of inbuilt security, the blockchain data is also certifiable, helping to move the nation’s electricity grid into the future.

Pink Economy

All minority groups are at risk from discrimination, in some cases approved or even caused by governments. A blockchain system for the LGBT community is helping this sector of the population to asset its rights without endangering its constituents. The decentralised system provides anonymity, keeping the identity of its users hidden and protecting them from possible retaliation.

Settlement after Disasters

The aftermath of a catastrophe such as a hurricane, flood, fire, or earthquake is often as hard to cope with as the catastrophe itself. Victims need financial aid and settlements fast to rebuild their lives. Blockchain can survive such catastrophes and continue to function without human intervention. This makes it a solution of choice for settlements of catastrophe bonds that allow borrowers to write off debt and move on.

Crypto-Tourism

Not every cryptocurrency holder is a hodler. Some see their digital coins as cash they would like to spend now. A Hawaiian blockchain could be the solution for such spenders and for the state to encourage tourism by letting visitors pay in situ with bitcoin and other digital currencies. The Hawaiian government sees this as being especially attractive to Asian tourists, potentially a large source of income for the island.

Property Deals

Blockchain has also become a technology of interest for immutable land registries. It can be used to enable property transactions, as pioneering start-up Propy has shown with its Ethereum-based real estate solution. Using smart contracts, the world’s first blockchain enabled property transaction was recently conducted in Kiev, Ukraine.

Sustainable Fishing

Respect for marine resources can now be enforced through a blockchain app for sustainable fishing. The application lets inspectors check the sources of fish, verify legality, and intervene in cases where sources are unethical or official quotas are exceeded. Known as “net to plate” tracking, like land agriculture’s “farm to plate”, the system is designed to help conserve precious and sometimes precarious food resources.

Homeland Security

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sees blockchain as way to store surveillance data reliably and resiliently with protection against data compromise. The Factom blockchain is the platform of choice for the DHS that has matched Factom capabilities to its needs for recording output from surveillance cameras and other devices.

Maritime Logistics

Few networks of assets are as distributed and as changeable as those of ships and the containers they carry. However, blockchain was built for highly distributed networks and to allow network nodes to send information on their status, location and other items of information to a permanent ledger copied to all. Shipping giant Maersk pioneered the application of blockchain and other companies like ZIM now also use it to record shipping data.

Fiscal Processes

Taxes and invoices can be handled rapidly and efficiently by blockchain. For the Chinese government and the Chinese population of more than 1 billion, the total savings in time and effort can be monumental. The Chinese State Administration of Taxation is working with the Miaocai network to bring blockchain benefits to the country’s fiscal processes and invoicing.

InsureTech

Smart players in insurance are looking to new technology for a competitive advantage. Established insurance companies are partnering with clued-up IT vendors, as in the teamwork between insurer American International Group (AIG) Inc and IBM Corp to develop a blockchain-based “smart” insurance policy to manage complex international coverage. A pilot has already been run for the client Standard Chartered Bank PLC.

Ecology and Preservation

Care for the Uncared (CfU), an NGO in Uganda, is working with blockchain developers to track and record the health, spread, and movement of endangered species to better protect them. The records are destined to be publicly accessible on the endangered species blockchain and a Bitcoin donation platform is part of the plan too.

Publicity

Bringing different groups together to transact in a peer-to-peer relationship is a defining characteristic of blockchain. In the world of advertising, agencies, brands, and publishers interact daily. The New York Interactive Advertising Exchange and Nasdaq have partnered to create an advertising marketplace based on Ethereum to serve these groups.

News Content

Civil is a decentralised journalism marketplace that uses blockchain to bring two significant advantages to journalists: permanence and self-governance. Journalistic content and historical records are no longer threatened by arbitrary deletion. Journalists also have the benefit of an incentives system designed to encourage quality content.

Cognitive Cities

From water management to parking, from street-lighting to air quality control, smart cities are destined to increase standards of living for those who reside or work in them. Taipei has partnered with IOTA whose Tangle technology is well suited to connecting things (as in the Internet of Things) together in a new style of blockchain network. Citizen ID cards called ‘TangleID’ cards are being created to help eliminate risks of identity theft and voter fraud, while also tracking health history and other data for government-related services. A palm-sized card with sensors is also planned to detect light, temperature, humidity and pollution to inform citizens in real time.

Vehicle Leasing

If you have ever rented a car and then noticed a dent in it, you know the sort of ding-dong “it wasn’t me!” argument you risk having with the rental company. Blockchain could help settle the matter rapidly and fairly. Car status and customer information for every rental can be stored on a blockchain with appropriate security and access rights.

Hydrocarbon Storage

The oil industry could not operate without large-scale automation. Further possibilities to reduce manual effort and increase reliability are always of interest. S&P Global Platts is trying out blockchain to record data on oil storage, reducing the need to manage data manually and with it the risk of operator error.

Rail Operations

Another inherently distributed network is the railway and the rolling stock that travels on it. Novotrans, one of the largest operators of rolling stock in Russia, is putting in place blockchain for repair and inventory data, as well as other information. Speed of operations is destined to increase, while data corruption and tampering is expected to decrease.

Video Games

Money, real estate titles, art ownership, in short, anything of value can find a permanent, unfalsifiable home on blockchain. For video game aficionados, value also comes in the form of in-game rewards and digital collectibles. Industry major Ubisoft is already on the path towards integrating blockchain in video games for those very reasons.

Energy Trading

Natural energy flies out in all directions but energy surpluses on the energy trading market need firmer management. Strong control in the form of faultless record keeping is needed, for accountability and for compliance. A test project from Essentia will see several major energy suppliers using blockchain to track energy distribution, more easily, more reliably, and better adapted to the complexity of this market.

What’s Next for Blockchain?

Blockchain technology is passing its tipping point, that moment where the change it brings becomes irreversible. The reason is simple: it offers more advantages than traditional solutions and solves several of their problems too. It is difficult to think of any sector in which blockchain could not bring an improvement.

However, there are still important components to be put in place. One important element is interoperability — making blockchains work together. While individual blockchains outstrip other approaches in terms of efficiency and security, interoperability between blockchains has yet to be perfected. The blockchains themselves are also still not quite right. Scalability issues continue to plague the industry, as do high transaction fees. In short, blockchain is currently functional, it’s just not yet efficient enough for mass adoption — but the time will come.

Whatever the definitive solutions to these problems, it is imperative that they are open source and available for all to implement. The blockchain revolution has been built on transparency of the software powering it, as well as the transactions executed on it. People have been smart enough to invent blockchains in the first place, sooner or later they will find an excellent solution for making them work together.

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