Blockchain Use Cases

• Property or assets, whether physical or digital, such as laptops, mobile phones, diamonds, automobiles, real estate, e-registrations, digital files, etc. can be registered on blockchain. This can enable asset transactions from one person to another, maintaining the transaction log, and checking the validity or ownerships. In addition, notary services, proof of existence, tailored insurance schemes, and many more such use cases can be developed.
• There are many financial use cases being developed on blockchain such as cross-border payments, share trading, loyalty and rewards system. Know Your Customer (KYC) among financial institutions such as banks and Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is one of the biggest trending use cases. ICO is the best way of crowdsourcing today by using cryptocurrency as digital assets. A coin in an ICO can be thought of as a digital stock in an enterprise, which is very easy to buy and trade.
• Blockchain can be used to enable “The Wisdom of Crowds”, taking the lead and shaping businesses, economies, and various other national phenomena by using collective wisdom! Financial and economic forecasts based on the wisdom of crowds, decentralised prediction markets, decentralised voting, as well as stocks trading can be possible on blockchain.
• The process of determining music royalties has always been extremely convoluted. The internet-enabled music streaming services facilitated higher market penetration, but made the royalty determination more complex. This concern can be addressed using blockchain by maintaining a public ledger of music rights and ownership information as well as authorised distribution of media content.
• This is the IoT era, with billions of IoT devices everywhere and many more ready to join the pool. A whole bunch of different makes, models, and communication protocols makes it difficult to have a centralised system to control the devices and provide a common data exchange platform. This is also an area where blockchain can be used to build a decentralised peer-to-peer system for the IoT devices to communicate with each other. Autonomous Decentralised Peer-To-Peer Telemetry (ADEPT) is a joint initiative from IBM and Samsung that has developed a platform that uses elements of the Bitcoin’s underlying design to build a distributed network of devices - a decentralised IOT. ADEPT uses three protocols: BitTorrent for file sharing, Ethereum for smart contracts, and TeleHash for peer-to-peer messaging in the platform. The IOTA foundation is another such initiative.
• In the government sectors, blockchain has also gained momentum. There are use cases where technical decentralisation is necessary, but politically should be overseen by governments; land registration, vehicle registration and management, e-voting, etc. are some of the active use cases. Supply chains are another area where there are some great use cases of blockchain. Supply chains have always been prone to disputes across the globe, as it was always difficult to maintain transparency in these systems.