- Blockchain is a type of distributed database or ledger, initially developed to cryptocurrency – Bitcoin.
- It brings about allows for the permanent, immutable, and transparent recording of data and transactions.
- Blockchain technology has many useful and productive use cases.
A blockchain is a 21st century technology that enables the secure sharing of information. It is a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger technology that allows data to be stored on thousands of servers across the world. Any network user can see all the entries that appear at any given time, but it’s nearly impossible to gain control of the network.
Blockchain provides transparent transactions for companies and empowers them to create secure networks and real-time communications with partners around the world. This technology can potentially unleash a whole new wave of possibilities for every sector and industry.
Blockchain Use Cases
Blockchain is largely used for cryptocurrency transactions, but it’s also used for:
- International Payments – blockchain technology helps make international payments and money transfers secure and efficient. Transactions,via blockchain, is settled within seconds, and significantly reduces banking transfer fees. A good example is Santander One Pay FX, which uses Ripple’s xCurrent to enable customers to make same-day or next-day international money transfers.
- Supply Chain – blockchain technology can bring out transparency and traceability in the supply chain network, and reduce costs as well. It can help participants record price, date, location, quality, certification and other relevant information to effectively manage the supply chain. Blockchain technology improves visibility and compliance over outsourced contract manufacturing.
- Education – it is ideal to use blockchain technology to store academic data and records. It can create smart contracts, distribute student loan payments and share crypto incentives. These processes boost accountability, transparency and engagement in the edtech sector. One such example is “Gigamesh”, which is a knowledge-sharing platform on Ethereum smart contracts. Book readers, students and authors on this platform can discuss a novel or other works. They are incentivized with GIL tokens.
- Healthcare – blockchain technology has proven to be very useful in the healthcare industry. It brings credibility and findings to clinical trials. Blockchain is used to maintain the monitoring of the pharmaceutical supply chain, and track medication responsibilities. Administrators or executives use it to maintain the financial statements in hospitals; minimizes data transformation time and cost.
Bringing it to Scale
Fintech companies and decentralized institutions can bring blockchain to scale. The scalability of blockchain execution, as per Chainlink, is in terms of transactions per second (TPS). It refers to the number of computations per second since transactions vary in complexity and cost.
When scaling the execution layer, companies try to achieve more computations per second without substantially increasing the hardware requirements on individual full nodes that validate the transactions in blocks. It should be noted that full nodes need to have access to historical data in order to sync to the blockchain to validate new blocks and execute new state changes. The nodes are responsible for the correctness and reliability of storing the entered data in the distributed ledger.
Scale refers to the speed of the blockchain. Thus, its crucial for payments companies and institutions like money transfers, crypto exchanges, and banking institutions etc.