What began as the basis of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, blockchain technology essentially a virtual ledger capable of recording and verifying a high volume of digital transactions is now spreading across a wave of industries. Blockchain tech has gone far beyond its beginnings in banking and cryptocurrency: Annual global spending on blockchain applications has almost tripled since 2017.
1. BANKING - Swiss bank UBS and UK-based Barclays are both experimenting with blockchain as a way to expedite back office functions and settlement, which some in the banking industry say could cut up to $20B in middleman costs. Blockchain company Ripple has partnered with financial institutions like Santander and Western Union with the goal of improving the efficiency of cross-border payments.
2. MESSAGING APPS - Encrypted messaging app Telegram raised $1.7B from private investors before cancelling the public sale of its planned $1.2B initial coin offering. Telegraph’s TON Labs has also partnered with Wirecard, a European financial services entity, to build a digital banking platform. Chat platform Kik has raised over $100M via an ICO for its in-app currency.
3. HEDGE FUNDS - Backed by names including First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures, Numerai is taking the hedge fund model — employing a bunch of traders and quants — and decentralizing it. Numerai sends its thousands of disparately located quants encrypted datasets and asks them to build predictive models, and the best contributors are rewarded with Numerai’s token called Numeraire. Then, Numerai takes the strategy and creates a meta-model to make trades.
4. VOTING - By capturing votes as transactions through blockchain, governments and voters would have a verifiable audit trail, ensuring no votes are changed or removed and no illegitimate votes are added. One blockchain voting start-up, Follow My Vote, has released the alpha version of its stake-weighted end-to-end blockchain voting solution. Agora aims to develop a blockchain-based method for casting votes. The technology aims to prevent election fraud by using a custom blockchain record.
5. INTERNET IDENTITY & DNS - The decentralized system allows certain trusted organizations to issue credentials to users, who can then use the credentials to prove their identities to other organizations, enhancing personal privacy and streamlining the verification process.
6. CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY - Other potential applications include using blockchain to provide massive scale data authentication. For example, using its blockchain-enabled KSI , cybersecurity start-up Guard time tags and verifies data transactions.
7. RIDE SHARING - Ride apps like Uber and Lyft represent the opposite of decentralization, since they essentially operate as dispatching hubs and use algorithms to control their fleets of drivers. Arcade City operates similarly to other ride-sharing companies but allows drivers to establish their rates with the blockchain logging all interactions.
8. INTERNET ADVERTISING – Users who opt in receive fewer, but better targeted ads without the malware. And advertisers ger better data on their spending.
9. CRYPTO EXCHANGES – One-way blockchain reduces conventional cybersecurity risk is by simply removing the need for human intermediaries, thus lessening the threat of hacking, corruption or human error.
10. EDUCATION AND ACADEMIA - By nature, academic credentials must be universally recognized and verifiable. Deploying blockchain solutions in education could streamline verification procedures, thereby reducing fraudulent claims of un-earned educational credits. Learning Machine, a 10-year-old software start-up, has collaborated with MIT Media Lab to launch of the Blockcerts toolset, which provides an open infrastructure for academic credentials on the blockchain.
Ref: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/industries-disrupted-blockchain/
