In a market saturated with new and innovative business strategies, it can be difficult to decide which to adopt. On one side you don’t want to fall behind when it comes to the latest technology. On the other, you don’t want to waste your money on a “cutting-edge” fluke. If you’re looking for a new, efficient way to carry out transactions, blockchain is a technology that your company might find helpful. Far from a short-term trend, blockchain is a revolutionary approach to transactions that major companies are beginning to embrace.
What Blockchain Entails
You might wonder why blockchain technology seems so cryptic. The challenge is that it used to be almost exclusively connected to tech circles, and was not widely used by the general public and non-tech businesses. This history is part of why it seems so mysterious today -- it’s relatively new to most of us, and the way it works can be difficult to explain without going into confusing and complex concepts.
Here’s the very short version of it: Blockchain is a way to make transactions and transfers online without the use of an intermediary. Instead of trusting a third party to keep the transaction history safe and accurate, blockchain lets you seal “pages” of transactions with a key code for security. If you’d like to delve deeper into how this technology works, check out this WTF is The Blockchain.
As I mentioned in my article, The Top 10 Business Trends That Will Drive Success In 2018, individuals and businesses use blockchain for a variety of reasons. Though some “shady businesses” might use blockchains to avoid leaving a paper trail, it’s more often employed to gain improved assurance and privacy. It also allows users to exchange money without the backing of a physical currency, which is one of the qualities that has made Bitcoin famous and makes it sometimes controversial.
Speaking of Bitcoin -- although it’s the most well-known blockchain-based cryptocurrency right now, there’s a wide variety of blockchain-based services on the market. "Bancor is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that allows for intermediary-free transactions to occur and they are processing over $10 million worth of trades daily,” says Jeremy Epstein, the CEO of Never Stop Marketing. Jeremy is considered by many to be the world's leading authority on the intersection of blockchains and marketing. He serves as an advisor to blue chip Crypto projects like Zcash and OpenBazaar.
Why You Would Adopt Blockchain
One of the clearest and most relevant reasons that many companies are embracing blockchain technology is efficiency. We can all understand how exchanges can become quicker and simpler when they don’t have to go through a third party. It’s also beginning to move document authentication toward obsolescence, removing a step in the transactional process