Amounted $708 million in 2017, the global blockchain market will reach $60.7 billion in 2024, according to Market Study Report. Although it may seem that blockchain software solutions are mainly employed for carrying out financial transactions, there are different use cases in almost every industry.
Healthcare, insurance, banking, supply chain management, agriculture, retail, manufacturing, automotive, real estate, stock trading, crowdfunding, digital rights, elections are those fields that can take advantage of using it.
However, what benefits does blockchain provide? How do you use it for solving your business-specific challenges? How do you define does your company really should adopt this technology? Learn the answers in our new article!
What is blockchain technology
Emerged in 2009 as the technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain is an immutable digital data record which maintains a continuously growing number of transactions. Once data is uploaded, it cannot be changed or deleted. With cryptographic algorithms, it provides safe information storage and financial operations’ security.
Representing a fully decentralized distributed ledger, blockchain excludes intermediaries and functions without a central authority. Information confidentiality, secure peer-to-peer transactions between distrusting/unknown parties, network transparency, inability to forge data are the main benefits you receive.
Today, this cutting-edge technology is undoubtedly one of the main software development trends. However, what business-specific issues does it solve? Let’s find out!
Top 7 challenges that you can solve with blockchain
When blockchain appeared 11 years ago and suggested an innovative way of carrying out transactions, it gained high popularity across the globe. In the beginning, it was the major technology employment. By now, various sectors have realized that there are many other use cases besides providing secure financial operations. As a result, we saw a new wave of blockchain industrial applications. Take a look at 7 challenges that blockchain solves!
1. Provide information security
You can adopt a blockchain solution for improving information privacy within your enterprise. This will be truly helpful if you have a lot of sensitive data and want to enable reliable message transfer between different parties (businesses, customers, etc.).
Logistics, healthcare, banking, governmental, manufacturing, insurance organizations generally work with important information and should prevent any leaks. By using this tech innovation, it will be possible to track each action, restrict data access, ensure transactions’ safety as well as secure various records.
2. Ensure supply chain traceability
Supply chain management is a complicated process which comprises multiple parties (suppliers, retailers, carriers, manufacturers), transactions between them, and transportation process. Sometimes cargo passes 150-200 stages from production to customer’s hands, where each should be efficiently traced. When there is no supply chain visibility, businesses often face challenges associated with delivery/shipment delays, thefts, and cargo losses.
In some cases, even a single-day delay may result in losing millions of dollars. In these terms, it’s very important to track the entire transportation life-cycle including cargo status, location, delivery stage, transactions, records, state of goods.
By giving all products their own digital IDs and recording everything in a distributed ledger, you’ll resolve these issues. With each activity tracked, your employees will have the ability to instantly check the necessary information and monitor supply chain processes.
3. Prevent counterfeit of goods
Unfortunately, either companies or individuals suffer from counterfeit of goods, which causes the biggest damage to fields like luxury retail (e.g., jewellery), historically valuable artefacts, pieces of arts, museum pieces, electronics, pharmaceuticals. Product falsifications may lead to losing not only millions and billions of dollars but customer credibility.
By helping ensure authenticity, blockchain-enabled solutions can relieve you from worrying about fraud. Since an ID placed on goods/objects is unique, you can check the product’s owner and trace the source it came from. This way, counterfeit risks will be removed.
4. Improve document management & minimize paperwork
When concluding multiple agreements, their paper versions are almost always required. As a consequence, there are numerous documents that should be safely stored. However, human errors when preparing contracts, making records, entering information into a computer may cost a lot or at least cause inconvenience when correcting them.
So, you can develop a blockchain solution to enhance document management across all departments. By providing a secure digital data record, you’ll minimize paperwork, eliminate errors, prevent information distortion, as well as reduce costs.
You can even remove logins and passwords for user authorization while maintaining the highest security level. Just add an encrypted identity to employees’ devices who need access, which will let you verify each sign in. This will also help you save time and protect data.