Top 10 Use Cases of the Blockchain Technology Across Industries

by Sofia Coppol, Guest Contributor

Blockchains are taking over the world. It’s no more the technology of future. Blockchain applications are nowadays being deployed across industries; be it from automobile to healthcare to real estate. In fact, you can easily find at least one example per business vertical globally on how the blockchain technology is making a difference to each of them.
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Here are the top 10 use cases of the blockchain technology across industries.

1. Government
The Blockchain is attracting the attention of a number of governments, which are expressing their interests in the technology to store public records on the decentralized data management system and to develop various other sorts of applications. Here are some examples:

• Essentia is building an e-government pilot with Finland’s Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners.
• UK’s HM Treasury (HMT) and the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) are working on a blockchain distributed ledger technology based application to increase government’s welfare distribution efficiency.
• UAE’s government is exploring the possibilities of applying blockchains to business registration, trade, and central bank operations.
• Estonia’s government is piloting blockchain-based solution for voting identity management and healthcare.
  
  

There are tons of examples on how the governments across the world are deploying the technologies to public sector applications.

2. Healthcare
It has always been difficult to manage medical records in a right way. They are notoriously scattered and erroneous. They are often inconsistently handled. In result, there are incorrect and incomplete patient records. But the technology of blockchain will streamline everything. Here are some use cases on how blockchain can help the healthcare industry.  

• FarmaTrust, a tracking system to eliminate counterfeit drugs, is working on a blockchain based platform to improve the supply-chain integrality of drugs and to eliminate counterfeit drugs proliferation.
• Medicalchain is a blockchain based decentralized platform to solve problems related health data exchange. It provides permission to access and interact with medical records required by different healthcare agents like hospitals, doctors, labs, pharmacists, and insurers.
• Healthureum is developing a blockchain based solution and smart contact technology to integrate it in healthcare’s critical services, for their standardization and to provide them with a desired scalability.
• Synthium Health is building a unique networking marketplace to bring together healthcare providers and suppliers for simple, efficient, and cost-effective exchanges to that build businesses. 
  

3. Supply Chains
Almost all businesses, involved in the manufacturing, assembling, and delivering of products, heavily rely on their supply chains. Their success, credibility, and profits largely depend on their supply chain networks. The more they have a responsive supply chain, the more they are able to stay at the market’s forefront. Here, Blockchain is providing the same responsiveness to businesses engaged in the supply chain sector.  

• Bext360 is using blockchain technology to provide better tractability of all elements of the worldwide coffee trade—from farmer to consumer.
• The Pacific Islands’ tuna industry is working on a tractability supply chain project that tracks tunas from vassal to market in order to eliminate illegal fishing and human right violence.  
• Walmart, Kroger, Golden State Foods, McCormick and Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever, McLane Company, IBM, Driscoll’s, and Dole have partnered as a consortium to determine how the global supply chain can benefit from blockchain.
• IBM and Walmart have teamed up to launch Blockchain Food Safety Alliance in China to improve food tracking and safety.

4. Real Estate
The traditional way of doing business in the real estate industry is quite lengthier. Also, there are involvements of undesired middlemen and brokers who are always seeking commissions from both sellers and buyers. The approach followed is also not completely transparent. Blockchain avoids all these parties and their unwanted prices and, makes a real estate deal as a business of just two people: the seller and buyer.

• Ukraine is the first country to use the blockchain technology to facilitate a property deal.
• Many countries and states, such as Honduras, Brazil, and the Republic of Georgia are working on the implementation of blockchain based land title systems.
• Atlant, the blockchain-based global real estate platform, wants to ship the real estate to blockchain. The company offers two major services, namely P2P rentals and tokenized ownership.

Bee Token, which was formed in 2017 with a team of former employees from Google, Facebook, Uber, and digital identity blockchain projects, is working on blockchain system with an intention of taking the economic model of platforms like Uber and Airbnb and couple it with the P2P technology of blockchain and apply it to home rentals.

5. National Security and border control
Blockchains can also be used for national security and border control. Here are some examples:

• In 2016, the US Department of Homeland Security announced a project that would use the blockchain as a means of securely storing and transmitting the data it captures.
• Essentia has met with the Dutch government to develop a system for vetting passengers, who are traveling between Amsterdam and London.

6. Oil Industry
The oil industry is one the most important segments of the global economy; however, many processes and procedures in this industry are still carried out through the centuries’ old traditional approaches. In result, it increases the cash cycle time, decreases transactions visibility, and increases the overhead and a number of cost intermediates. Blockchain can transform the oil and gas industry’s supply chain networks with a secure public ledger and remove the slow and outdated workflows.

7. Railways and rail freight forwarding
Russian rail operator Novotrans is already using blockchains to improve the speed of operations. Novotrans, as the largest operator in the country, is working on using the use blockchains to record the data related to repair requests, inventory, and other operations. A blockchain based system will introduce resistant to tampering and corruptions.

Also, the blockchain can advance the tracking of goods’ movements. When it happens, then both railways and customers will not experience any sort of difficulty in following the specific freight-consignments. It will restore the reliability of rail freight services.

8. Car Leasing
The distributed ledger technology of blockchain is preferably suitable for registering any kind of records securely and unalterably. The same level of security and inalterability is also required in the rental car industry. Businesses in this industry need a protocol to store customer data in a fully encrypted but sharable form. Here is how blockchain is helping car leasing businesses:

• Essentia is developing a blockchain system that will store customer data in an encrypted and sharable form, on permission-basis, with relevant parties.
• DocuSign and Visa have designed a blockchain pilot to introduce greater speed and automation to the car-leasing process.
  

9. Smart Cities
A city runs on a lot happenings. There we have heavy traffic movements, public services, timely arriving subways, and so on. So far these things are taking place in traditional ways, but blockchain can change it all. Blockchain can be the most fundamental technology of future’s smart cities. Here is how blockchain is helping smart cities:

• Taipei, the capital of Nationalist China is working with IOTA on design cards with light temperature, humidity and pollution and, it all will work on blockchain.
• Local authorities in the USA have recognized the power of blockchain in the provision of providing public services and have begun several projects which are at different levels of implementations.
• The Government of Australia has also announced a grant of $8 million for a blockchain project to create ‘smart utilities.

10. Insurance
Blockchain also has scopes in the insurance industry. Many don’t know that the technology has already been applied by different organizations, such as:

Insurance American International Group Inc with IBM has completed a pilot of a so called “smart-contract” multi-national policy for Standard Chartered Bank PLC and is planning to manage its complex international coverage through the blockchain technology.

You too can take advantages of the blockchain technology. All you need to do hire blockchain development services to get your idea implemented.
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Author Bio:

Sofia Coppol is a digital marketing expert in Rapidsoft Technologies, is an offshore software development company which provides Software for Education, Automation, Construction and Finance across the global. She loves to write on latest mobile trends, mobile technologies, startups, and enterprises.