Blockchain and Future
--
Blockchain has been the most significant disruption in the financial markets for a part of the past decade. Blockchain works on the concept of the decentralization of currency. The flagbearer of the disruption that Blockchain has caused in the financial markets has been Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a type of virtual currency whose value fluctuates with time. Millions of individual investors have put their money into Bitcoin in the past few years, and slowly, institutional investors are also beginning to catch on.
However, Blockchain, as a technology, isn’t merely about finance and virtual currency. It is a budding area of exploration, and new Blockchain applications are being discovered and created every year. Let us look at the future of Blockchain and the applications we are likely to see in the coming years.
Transparency of Art Statistics
The primary feature that Blockchain technology thrives on is transparency and decentralization. It is capable of making information transparently available to multiple stakeholders in a trustworthy fashion. This applies to the world of art as well.
Among the major issues that artists have with major production and distribution houses is that they seldom get access to accurate statistics regarding the number of people who viewed their art. It is crucial not just from an artistic perspective but also for their earnings.
Blockchain allows for the simplification of rights management for artists. Using Blockchain, it becomes significantly easier to establish the ownership of a piece of art and pay artists per play.
Data Protection and Collaboration
Under a conventional setting, the collaboration and protection of data can seem like opposing goals. To collaborate using data, you need to provide access to many stakeholders, while to project data, you often need to restrict this access.
The world of data is bound to be among the significant sources of future jobs in the Blockchain domain. It is because it helps resolve the natural tug of war between protection and collaboration. Blockchain technology allows users to audit data while retaining its immutability. It acts as a natural log of all the actions performed on every section of the data and helps stakeholders assign accountability if an adverse event occurs.
Supply Chain Management
Blockchain technology is known to make transactions and data transparent and easily accessible as well as immutable. Blockchain allows for the easy authentication of transactions in a supply chain and makes them more accurate and trustworthy. It reduces the total time required for the transaction and enables all stakeholders to concurrently monitor several supply chain stages. In addition, the distribution of the ledger improves the reliability of the transactions, and fraud is minimal since these transactions are irrevocable.
In addition, Blockchain technology can help develop a centralized repository for reliable data that various stakeholders in the supply chain can refer to. This data is immutable, and its access is logged continuously.
Data Privacy
Data privacy rules in various countries have been changing at a breakneck speed in the past few years. All countries have been taking steps to manage their citizens’ confidential data, including mandating that the data is stored within the nation’s boundaries and permission has to be taken to store several aspects of this data.
Blockchain has the potential to transform the field of data privacy completely. Blockchain can transfer the control of a user’s personal data back to the user. Any attempt to access this data will be logged, and all attempts will have to be authenticated by the user to proceed. The authentication of a user’s identity will become more accessible and trustworthy than ever before.
These eventualities are already causing waves in organizations that depend on data monetization for revenue. Some alternative money streams may need to be considered.
Cross-Industry Collaboration
In the current scenario, companies of different industries use different data management methods, different software suites for different internal functions, and generally several different methods to carry out the same intended activity. This causes significant hurdles with other companies of the same industry or companies across industries needing to collaborate or work on a common project.
Blockchain technology can solve integration issues in such cases. Through Blockchain, data transparency is maintained across stakeholders, using a common platform to access, manage, and change data related to a particular project. Additionally, any discrepancies that creep into the process of data consolidation can be addressed using Blockchain, creating a unified flow of safe and authentic data.
Healthcare
The domain of telehealth and electronic healthcare systems is currently going through its teething phase. Several applications, software, and methods are coming up to capture the health data of an individual. However, a major issue after this data has been captured is making it freely and seamlessly accessible to physicians, healthcare institutions, insurance companies, and the patients themselves. Ensuring free access to electronic health records can transform the domain of healthcare through integration and cross-institutional collaboration.
Blockchain can help create a central repository for the electronic health records of millions of patients. Through the stringent authentication capabilities of Blockchain, it can be ensured that these records are accessible only to the patient and to stakeholders that the patient verifies.
The advantages of these electronic health records extend across health informatics and data science domains since they can be used to train artificial intelligence algorithms for improved healthcare services.
Conclusion
Blockchain is among the significant areas of upskilling that thousands of computer science students and professionals worldwide are attempting to gain expertise. The above examples of the current and future applications of Blockchain are but a slight peak into an area of technology that is likely to be all-pervasive in the coming years. Visit 21K Skills and learn more about Blockchain and allied technologies!
