How Blockchain Technology applies to both Financial and Non-Financial Services?
Unlike traditional payment mechanism, Blockchain aims to replace intermediaries facilitating direct payment transfer between parties using decentralized ledger or database management system. It enables participants to record of data such as chain of transaction and share instantly among participants ensuring high transparency. Even though Blockchain emerged as a centrally controlled free system for payment transfer but it has expanded to non-financial services too such as identity management especially in IoT era, digital documentation management, smart contracts management, digitization of physical assets & trading with cryptocurrencies, authorization & authentication of users & devices including IoT, intellectual property management, medical record management, property transfer, digital voting system management, digital ownership management, music ownership management & distribution and many more areas that are currently unexplored.
There are lots of scenarios where Blockchain brought tremendous benefits in each type of application such as smart contract in the form of contract management related to financial derivatives, corporate bonds, real estate transactions, smart investment plans, and others, IP ownership management in the form of encryption & time stamped documents without revealing proprietary information, identity management in the form of using cryptographic hash against passport information, social security numbers, tax identification numbers, driving licensees & others to identify people’s identity in distributed network, medical records in the form of using encrypted private key against personal health data allowing sharing of selected data to doctors, and digitization of property such as house, car, land & exchange title digitally.
Blockchain network is a set of digital nodes that encrypt information & data to create a block. Each block may represent information related to money transaction, contracts, assets, identities, or anything else in digital format. It allows each participants to view the histories of the transactions by himself or herself. A protocol manager in built with the system automatically manages new edits or entries initiated, validate, record, and distribute across participants. In the process, each mining computer calculate cryptographic hash functions such as fingerprint to create block and verify transaction/identity. Each block of the process contains hash of the previous block that connects all block in a long chain of system.
Bitcoin and Etherum are the early form of Blockchain representing cryptocurrencies and smart contract management respectively. It is so far widely used in public blokchain network but industry is now exploring option to create private blokchain and consortium Blokchain.
Most of the enterprises, potentially 65% of them will be using some form of Blokchain technology by 2020 to create digital twining of physical assets or secure their digital assets.
They will also apply it in consumer facing platform to manage payment system securely and in transparent manner.
My research titled "Blockchain Technology and Solutions: Market Outlook and Forecasts 2017 - 2022" examines the technology, leading companies, and solutions in the evolving Blockchain ecosystem. The report evaluates current and anticipated use cases for Blockchain and assesses the market potential globally, regionally, and segmented by deployment type and industry vertical for the period 2017 to 2022. The benefits of the report include:
- Blockchain market forecasts 2017 to 2022
- Understand Blockchain technology and solutions
- Identify emerging Blockchain use cases and opportunities
- Learn about how Blockchain will be used in different industries
- Identify opportunities for Blockchain integration and operations