Blockchain technology often emerges as an answer to many problems because it is easy to imagine high-level use cases of it. There are numerous flowcharts circulating on the internet that can help guide your decision as to whether Blockchain is the right solution to your problem or not. Below is a list of those flowcharts:
- Birch-Brown-Parulava Model
- Suichies model
- IBM model
- A. Lewis model
- Karl Wüstl and Arthur Gervais model
- Morgen E. Peck model
- DHS model
- Cathy Mulligan model
With all that in mind we can now take a look at the various applications, or use cases, of Blockchain technology as shown in the diagram below.
Finance
The transfer of value has always been an expensive and slow process in the finance sector. This is especially true for the cross-border payments. For instance, if a person wants to transfer money from Australia to their family in India, who have an account with a local bank, it takes a number of banks before the money can be collected. Blockchain technology can speed up and simplify this process, cutting out many of the traditional middlemen. At the same time, it makes money remittance more affordable.
Other areas in finance sector are also proposed for Blockchain usage such as settlement, transactions of securities, claims and etc. Ripple is a good example of Blockchain representing this field.
Loyalty Points and Rewards
Loyalty programs give reward points to consumers for making purchases and let consumers redeem their reward points for gifts.
Using a Blockchain, points accrual on the Blockchain. This can reduce liability, and make it possible to manage multiple partner brands with relative ease, essentially creating a wallet and exchange for loyalty points. Loyalty incentives can flow across brands, at the discretion of the brand owners. There are already different Blockchains in this sector such as Rakuten coin, loyyal, Pravici, Incent and etc.
Medical
In this sector, Blockchain is being used to manage medical data such as electronic health records and medication records. Different organizations such as medical institutions, pharmacists and health insurers can request permission to access a patient’s record to serve their purpose and record transactions on the Blockchain.
Companies such as Medicalchain, Patientory and SimplyVital Health are using Blockchain to manage patients’ data.
Supply Chain
The food supply chain is the most complex and fragmented of all supply chains. The production is found all over the world both on land and in water. A lot of the producers and intermediaries are difficult to identify and track. Blockchain allows secure traceability and control without all participants disclosing all their customers and suppliers to a central party. The level of privacy to enforce can be decided by the participants in the system.
The following examples are now in use or can be implemented today using existing technology, mainly automotive supplier payments, meat traceability, electric power microgrids, cold-chain monitoring.
Walmart is prime example of company that is using Blockchain to get suppliers to put food on the Blockchain to help reduce waste, better manage contamination cases and improve transparency.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage provides service to store data on a Blockchain. There are already cloud storage marketplaces spun up that allows hosts to sell their surplus storage capacity and renters to purchase this surplus capacity and upload files.
There are few projects currently pioneering cloud storage using Blockchain and they are IPFS and Filecoin, Sia, Storj and Swarm.
Authorship
The content creators, consumers and publishers go through the problems in current marketplace where content theft, licensing issues are common. Also in the world of artworks and collectibles, you have forgery problem. There are projects such as Po.et and Veisart that are using Blockchain to address such problems.
In the next part of the series, we'll look at why we need Blockchain testing, as well as testing tools and challenges.
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