Where is the Blockchain Technology going in 2019?
I will share my thoughts in many projects from very different industries and their contributions to the crypto industry and the development of a decentralized global system.
It has been now a one-year bear market with no clear indication of coming to an end any time soon. If we follow up the 2013 to 2015 bear market, then we are in for a couple of months of accumulation phase.
Now it’s the best time to start looking at real business models and real projects that have already launched a product or they are preparing the final stages of the prototype to release the alpha versions, so the average user can start using dApps without knowing that is using a Blockchain.
What industries might be disrupted from Decentralization?
Let’s start with Supply Chain, this is a Multi-Billion industry that is ready to be improved by new data storages and data transparency. Being able to track the origin of the products is a new and very efficient way to bring trust to the distribution system. I can mention an obvious use case for Data transparency when Companies are faking data of their products, in China over 100 children were given an expired vaccine. This is a real problem that the distribution systems are facing for many years now, and Blockchain Technology or other distributed systems can help to improve. Data integrity is especially important for food and health care companies if they can optimize their cost-efficiency models by being empowered by Blockchain they will surely do.
Energy Industry is another industry that can be improved a lot if regulators from different countries do not create significant barriers. The energy industry is one of the most regulated industries if not the most, so it creates monopolies and a lack of new businesses due to the level of difficulty to enter the market. Many startups are using Blockchain Technology to create a decentralized marketplace to create P2P energy transactions, and it sounds very interesting to be able has a consumer to trade with other consumers or producers energy at competitive rates with cheaper transactions, but unfortunately regulators are really slow in regulating new innovations and new technologies, this lack of legislation is putting new energy startups in the “edge of a cliff”.
The Music Industry is one of the industries with most disrupt potential with Blockchain Technology, the streaming of music has been in an exponential growth in the past couple of years with SoundCloud, Spotify and QMusic attracting thousands of artists and millions of listeners. From the Global Music Report 2018, the Growth in streaming revenue has achieved double digits 41.1% and the Digital share of global revenue increasing 54%, so it’s pretty much appealing for new artists to start streaming their content but the centralization of the music industry takes away a huge percentage of the artists revenues with the increase of intermediaries. In a report from Citigroup, only 12% of the industry revenue went for artists. If new music startups or even existent ones can use Blockchain to create P2P platforms that will increase the percentage of revenue for artists, it will spike a huge growth in the music industry, and it will bring many undiscovered artists to the light.
Decentralized Exchanges are becoming user-friendly
Decentralized Exchanges is one of the most important use cases for decentralization, with the recent growth of hacks to centralized exchanges it creates a lack of trust and a criminal environment surrounding the industry. It’s crucial for the crypto industry and traditional industries that get tokenized to have decentralized exchanges to allow digital value transfer in a secure and safe way and at the same that is user-friendly. There are two different protocols, 0x and Loopring that allow the creation of decentralized exchanges that bring liquidity and efficiency to decentralized exchanges, but its not yet ready for the average user, 0x being very friendly for developers with good looking and easy access APIs but in the end it’s hard to use, for the average user its still so much easier to use centralized exchanges.
The Switcheo Exchange is a gorgeous exchange with great UI, very good API docs, for market makers and bot developers but its especially, very easy to use. The DEX works very well with nep-5 and erc20 tokens, for market makers, it has a rebate program to incentivize being a market maker and creating orders in the order book. It has many Stablecoins with different competitions on different tokens for traders that enjoy trading prizes. Switcheo at the time being, is by far the best DEX, although we might see some great competition coming from Binance and NEX, until then, Switcheo DEX remains the top Product with an excellent UI and many different Ethereum wallets integrated, o3 wallet for NEO assets and Metamask, Trust Wallet, imToken Wallet and Coinbase wallet for Ethereum tokens. The only problem that Switcheo currently faces is liquidity like most of the exchanges are facing due to the Bear Market, some are taking more dubious paths with wash trading and fake volume but Switcheo has always taken the Transparent attitude and has made every effort to increase liquidity. Even though the market is bearish and is facing the winter, the Switcheo Team as always been working hard to develop to build a great product and a great community. They release very frequent updates on Medium and on their announcements telegram which is what investors, traders, enthusiasts like to see in a painful market. The future of Switcheo for 2019, looks still very promising with great development being made and great upcoming features such as fiat integration, third-party liquidity providers, email login, a transparent explorer for DEX trades and other Blockchains integration such as qtum. Finally, an honorable mention for their development on Atomic Swaps, they are being an important key in the improvement of interoperability and cross-chain transactions.
There are several other industries that will get disrupted with time and technological progress, for example, gaming industry with Enjin and Loom Network, the share register and Tokenization of traditional industries with Swarm Fund and Own, even the internet is becoming more decentralized with the development of projects like Elastos and Holochain. There are so much more and so many good projects with interesting ideas and very powerful concepts that can change the current system in a decade.
Don’t let the Bear Market change your mindset of a decentralized World, there is so much happening behind the scenes, that is getting hard to keep up with so many updates from different projects.
For the creation of the article https://medium.com/@snackeye0/the-disruption-of-different-industries-with-blockchain-f67a7cafd570
For more articles about crypto projects and Blockchain content visit https://blog.forkedblock.com/
Disclaimer: I’m a corporate finance student and a tech enthusiast, I’m in no way an expert on these discussed topics, and this article does not consist of financial advice or investment advice. It’s only my opinion and consists only in trying to raise awareness to the readers about technological break throws and where I think the current system might shift to.