Blockchain started in 2008 and has grown into a global phenomenon. As of today, there are over 25M bitcoin wallets around the world and new cryptocurrencies popping up each and every day. Cryptofinance is its own thing. As of 2018, 90% of European and North American banks were utilizing or exploring blockchain.
Fun blockchain facts below:
-The global blockchain technology market is estimated to accumulate 20B in revenue by 2024
-Blockchain reduce up to 30% of organization’s infrastructure costs
-Projected savings of up to $12B a year for financial services companies
-71% of business leaders who are actively using blockchain believe it plays a key role in advancement
-By 2025, over half of America’s healthcare companies are predicted to adopt blockchain for commercial deployment
90% of government agencies and organizations plan to invest in blockchain technology at some point
-Total spend for blockchain in 2018 was around $552M
-The main users and consumers of blockchain have been in financial services but that hasn’t stopped almost every other industry from checking it out and cashing in.
The manufacturing and supply chain industry has demonstrated a heavy appetite for blockchain use cases and applicability. From product provenance, purchase orders and fulfillment, reverse logistics and manufacturing, and reconciliations, the opportunities are there and being used.
The healthcare industry is also a heavy player in the blockchain space. From users wanting to own their own data, billing, reconciliations, coverage, middle men across big pharma, this industry is ripe for a blockchain regroup.
Tokenization is creating more and more investment opportunities. Inclusive of crypto, tokenization can also be applicable to anything; art, wine, real estate, etc. The concept is to assign a monetary or non-monetary value to a physical asset.
While specific industries and use cases are emerging almost daily. There are some really great blockchain use cases that have the potential to change our future and the way we do things, that you won’t hear about every day.
The holy grail of a blockchain use case is consumers being able to own and profit off of their own data. These three unique use cases cross over into data integrity and data ownership for organizations and consumers.
Data integrity and data supply chain enabled by blockchain
What is data integrity and why is it important? Data integrity means being able to trust your data and verify its contents. Today, we have so much data that we have access to in our lives, in our applications, our systems at work. But, it is right? And, can we trust it?
Blockchain enables us to trust and verify all the data that is on it. You can add simple API calls to ERP systems to cut out any manual entry and then verify the data as it moves across the blockchain. Think of a simple use case such as contracts and data management. The agreements between all the parties can be maintained on a blockchain based system; terms, conditions, signatures, expiry dates, etc. As updates are made or contract moves through its lifecycle everything is captured and made immutable. This is especially helpful for paper based and manual processes and actions. The cryptography allows users, actions, inputs, and outputs to be signed and sealed, giving us trusted information from trusted participants. In other words, no bad actors creating bad information.
Data supply chain is something not many people pay attention to but it is everywhere. How many companies buy and sell data? Heck, everyone. Managing a data supply chain comes with many challenges and nuances. How does one prevent data from being accessed by the wrong folks? There are contract terms and conditions, data locations, downloads, access logs, etc. Keeping track of a data supply chain can seem almost impossible. But then, there is blockchain (big sigh of relief from the back). Anchoring users, data sets, and contracts to a blockchain can make data supply chain management almost seamless. Users can be verified through unique identities across many organizations and access to data can be easily provisioned and deactivated. Terms and conditions around data sharing contracts can be monitored, and access logs are made available showing anyone who has touched the data sets.
Blockchain as an audit tool
If blockchain can be used to secure information, why not use it to secure audit information? All the time, auditors come into organizations and ask for what seems like hundreds and thousands of records from IT systems. Auditors make organizations capture queries of how the information was pulled, taking hours of precious time. I know because I have done it on both sides. Organizations have to give up loads of their own information that will go sit on an auditor’s laptop and servers. What if RPMs could be placed on those systems and configured to take snapshots of the environment state and record that information on a blockchain. Auditors would know that the information has not been changed and can be relied upon and organizations could retain their own information on their own systems vs giving a hundred files to Sally at KPMG who takes her laptop on vacation to Mexico and loses it. It would completely transform the way audits are done today, but that is good thing.
Blockchain and GDPR
Both super hot topics in their own right, but bring them together and it has the potential to transform an entire industry and the way organizations do business. This applies to both consumers and organizations. I will cover consumers in the latter part of the series. As it stands, organizations are required to provide a record of an employees data supply chain to them. They also have to delete an employee’s data from their system upon request and of course document that as well. Many organizations today are unable to comply with GDPR requirements because it is difficult to keep track of all employees and anytime their data was shared outside an organization. Blockchain has the ability to transform this entirely. Some would argue that something such as Amazon’s QLDB could also solve this. While it can, it isn’t a true blockchain and can’t offer that unique third party integration across various organizations, giving us insight into where the information really is.