5 Blockchains Evolving The Way We Work & Enjoy

As the fourth industrial revolution gathers pace, innovations are becoming faster, more efficient and widely accessible than ever before. Technology is becoming increasingly connected, and we are now seeing a convergence of the digital, physical and biological realms.  

Emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI), are enabling societal shifts as they seismically affect economies, values, identities, and possibilities for future generations. 

Blockchain is a foundational emerging technology of the fourth industrial revolution, much like the internet was for the previous (or third) industrial revolution. 

Its defining features are its distributed and immutable ledger and advanced cryptography, which enables the transfer of a range of assets among parties securely and inexpensively without third-party intermediaries.

Pay  

Over recent years, blockchain-based applications have multiplied and use cases that cross over the boundaries of the payments field have been envisioned. Blockchain is thought to have extraordinary potential and its adoption in the payments industry is believed to be groundbreaking. That is why the demand for hire blockchain developers is rising in the market.   

Payment ecosystems are evolving at an accelerating pace to embrace new transaction processing methods and technologies. The payment verticals of retail banking, merchant retail, transaction banking, billers, and digital banking that have traditionally operated in isolation are evolving towards a consolidated, real-time, any-to-any ecosystem. 

To support the payments evolution and the new payments ecosystem, institutions are actively learning about blockchain technology and understanding how they can leverage it. Institutions are conducting proof of concepts in their innovation labs, participating in blockchain consortium (e.g., R3CEV, Hyperledger Project – Linux Foundation) and investing in blockchain start-ups.

Trade and Finance

For trade finance applications, a key capability of blockchain technologies is smart contracts. These are small, self-executing programs stored on the distributed ledger that automatically execute payments or other actions when specific conditions are met. 

The recent rapid growth of peer-to-peer market exchanges for lending (Zopa, Lending Club, and Funding Circle, etc.), accommodation (Airbnb) and taxi services (Uber) have demonstrated the potential of peer-to-peer architectures. Blockchain has the potential to accelerate and simplify such models in both new and existing markets.

Play

The use of blockchain (or distributed ledger) technology for games (a.k.a blockchain games) and token-based digital collectibles is on the rise. The overnight popularity of CryptoKitties was as significant to raising the awareness of digital collectibles as Pokémon Go was to location-based AR games. 

Many blockchain games use the ERC-721 NonFungible Token (NFT) standard, which allows each item to be unique via its own serial number. One of the problems with many existing token designs is that they require deploying a separate contract to the blockchain for each item type.

A new standard, the ERC- 1155 token, takes a different approach, enabling tokens to be stored in a single contract with minimal data needed to distinguish one token from another.

Introducing Blockchain technology to the gaming industry will not just prevent the illegal trading of virtual assets but will also check issues related to hacking and stealing. This becomes possible because the encrypted blockchain ledgers are impenetrable. 

The immutable nature of Blockchain makes duplication of assets impossible thereby proving ownership of assets and ensuring the safety of gaming assets. 

One of the real benefits of cross-platform cryptocurrencies and collectibles and digital markets is that players can own these items and freely buy, sell and trade them. They are not subjected to walled gardens that exist in most video games. 

The blockchain’s item-first economy means item creators, developers, and users can earn more money on crypto items than traditional game platforms.     

One of the front runners in the decentralized virtual world space is Decentraland. Like a blockchain-based version of Second Life, Decentraland touts that it is a fully decentralized and open market where you can discover, buy, sell, and manage your parcels of land, build on it and generate revenue from your efforts. 

One Game is a decentralized virtual world game platform where players can create their own games. One Game introduces a decentralized and self-evolving world of “infinite variability” governed by creators, gamers, and players based on a set of consensus protocols that reward and incentivize the contributing actors. 

Moreover, One Game self-evolves with the help of genetic algorithms and other artificial intelligence algorithms. Blockchain is changing the game industry by enabling open communication between players and developers. 

This is possible because developments in blockchain apps are driven by a community consensus and not top-down. A player or another developer can come up with a great idea to enhance a game. If the community agrees, the enhancements will be made.

Work

It is the very nature of Blockchain which yields the potential to fundamentally alter the conditions of many jobs through the characteristics of traceability, accountability, transparency, control, and immutability.  

Blockchain leads to increased efficiency and a reduction in the use of labor for routine activities which can be accomplished by automating processes or sharing common access to immutable data.  

The use of objective performance records may result in the development of new rewards systems, which, in turn, could lead to increased motivation. Furthermore, certain Blockchain applications bear the potential to increase employee participation by allowing, for example, for shared database access.

As a consequence, workers’ autonomy may be restricted with single job tasks being exactly prescribed, measured and evaluated. Existing qualifications and skills may lose value, which ultimately might even lead to job losses. 

These include easy access to financial markets, as has happened during the recent rise of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), and the guarantee of ownership rights. 

In the public sector, communication with authorities may be easier and more traceable.

However, negative side effects may also appear, including a general loss of privacy due to greater data transparency and facilitated data access, and the widening of the “digital divide” caused by a lack of technological skills in some parts of the population. 

Potential financial losses may occur on investments made in the wake of enthusiastic media coverage of Blockchain-based technologies. 

Blockchain technology has the potential to directly affect the quantity (i.e., the sum total of all tasks to be completed by humans, as reflected by the size of the workforce needed) and quality (i.e., cognitive challenges involved in completing specific tasks) of work.

Management

As most of the candidate information usually sourced during the recruitment phase can already be viewed on the blockchain, there’s a huge amount of the process already streamlined.  

Resumes will be a thing of the past and looking at grades, certificates, work history and experience will be easily verified and visible to people with direct involvement. 

Candidate’s employment record that is accurate and reportedly impossible to falsify, the referencing process will become more transparent and address fraudulent credentials, increasing the chances of you hiring talent better suited to the business. 

Blockchain is a technology that allows consumers and businesses to track transactions from start to finish without having to consult a central authority tasked with preserving the transaction or encrypting the data.

By compartmentalizing these transactions, it provides transparency of what’s going on in the history of transactions and also makes these transactions more secure. 

With this kind of technology, cryptology replaces third-party intermediaries as the keeper of trust. By using mathematics instead of middlemen, it can help reduce overhead costs for companies or individuals when trading assets or can quickly prove ownership or authorship of information. 

If blockchain ends up streamlining the process of doing business and trading goods across borders making the exchange of value more mobile, in other words, expect it to make the global workforce more mobile at the same time, and for the same reasons. 

Companies that wish to stake their claim in a global economy must be able to cast a wider net when it comes to talent acquisition. Blockchain would already hold all of this validated information, it would significantly reduce the time and energy spent on this process, simplifying the whole process of conducting the interviews, checking, qualifications, validating work background and gathering references or applying for the necessary security checks. 

For ID2020, the blockchain technology is used to store biometric data, such as a fingerprint or iris scan, for legal ID and record-keeping. Organizations could use this technique of storing unique employee data to track attendance and expenses for wages and claim purposes. 

Human resources would have visibility to the real-time data and there would be no dispute that the records are accurate, strengthening the trust element in payment authorization and looking into claims made. 

Conclusion

I hope now you are quite clear about the blockchains that are revolutionizing the ways we play, pay and work. Implementation of blockchain technology would clearly make systems secure with the fastest transaction speeds and no money frauds. 

Being tamper-proof is another amazing feature of this potential blockchain technology. It is quite obvious that the need for the development of the blockchain-based application or we can say blockchain development companies in India is going to rise with time.