Does my business really need to adopt blockchain technology?

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!

Table of contents

What is blockchain technology

Emerged in 2008 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.

5. Protect intellectual property

By integrating blockchain software, organizations and individuals can simply protect their digital rights. Authors, musicians, photographers, content (text video, VR, etc.) creators, bloggers can ensure the security of their works, trademarks, and profit. Let’s consider several examples of such projects.

Based on blockchain, Cognate online service protects user assets regardless of their number and company’s size. Here this innovative technology allows making timestamped, inconvertible trademark use records. With machine learning under the hood, Cognate monitors trademarks and notifies customers about potential infringement.

On October 15, 2018, Sony Corporation, Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., and Sony Global Education announced the creation of a digital rights management (DRM) blockchain-powered platform. This product is intended to protect digital content involving films, music, VR, video content, textbooks, e-books.

6. Improve stock/cryptocurrency trading

In stock trading, blockchain simplifies financial operations, removes intermediaries and establishes trust. Imagine an online platform that lets customers issue, buy, sell securities without a central authority or regulatory body. Or a system for trading fiat money online. Employing technology, you’ll provide truly reliable transactions with increased speed.

Here at Arateg, we created a cryptocurrency exchange service for trading cryptocurrencies and fiat money . Displaying data in real-time, it allows replenishing e-wallets, analyzing financial metrics, withdrawing funds, etc.

7. Protect an IoT ecosystem

Furthermore, organizations can protect large data amounts collected from multiple devices and sensors. By maintaining an immutable record of communications between IoT devices, you will keep an activity history and provide confidentiality.

You can also use Ethereum smart contracts (self-executing agreements between the parties with the contract’s terms written into the code lines) for seamless message exchange channels. Smart devices will automatically perform necessary actions according to established terms. Thanks to this, automatic water management, energy consumption, supply chain monitoring, etc. become possible.

Chain of Things (CoT) is one of the world-famous projects which combines the Internet of Things and blockchain. CoT is a producer of integrated hardware solutions to address IoT challenges associated with identity, privacy, interoperability.

The company is involved in various ventures including Blue Maru—an environmental sensor solution and Blockpass—an identity verification platform for the Internet of Everything (IoE connects everything: humans, companies, devices, objects).

Do you need to adopt blockchain technology?

To help you understand will your company benefit from using it or not, we’ve prepared a checklist of 8 questions. If there are at least 1-2 matches, you should think about its integration into business processes.

1. Will your organization benefit from using a shared database?
2. Do you have a lot of sensitive information (e.g., customer personal, financial) that has to be safely stored and protected?
3. Do you have to meet strict industrial or financial regulations on information security?
4. Does your company need to carry out transactions without third-parties?
5. If you’ve answered “yes” to the previous question, do you have to carry them out with unknown/distrusting parties?
6. Do you trust users you’re going to provide with database access?
7. Does your company have trademarks, brand assets, digital rights that should be protected?
8. Do you want to make your IoT ecosystem safe? Establish secure message exchange channels?

If you think about creating a blockchain solution just because of its popularity or using it solely for making timestamped, inconvertible records (you don’t have to protect sensitive information or meet security standards), the answer is no. Perhaps, here other software will perfectly fit your needs, for example, CRM, ERP, developed on the base of classic web technologies.

The answer is yes if:

1. You want to remove intermediaries
2. Your goal is to provide the highest security level of data/transactions
3. A shared database is required
4. There is no trust between future network participants (employees, organizations, customers)
5. Your aim is to ensure workflow/supply chain traceability