Four Industries That Blockchain Is To Disrupt In The First Place
CryptoBit News Today2 min read
Businesses are getting serious about blockchain.
Ari Juels, a computer science faculty member at Cornell University and professor at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, explains that blockchains fundamentally serve to reduce the need for preexisting relationships and trust assumptions to ensure equitable commerce. Research from Deloitte indicates that 74 percent of large corporations with sales exceeding $500 million identify a “compelling business case” for blockchain technology. Blockchain's decentralized nature and immutability as a distributed ledger make it particularly attractive for reducing trust assumptions and auditing all transactions across various industries. However, confusion around what blockchain actually is persists even within the business community, leading to hesitation.
Improving Supply Chains
Incorporating every supply chain touchpoint into a smart contract removes the requirement for manual or human verification, Golub explains. When Frank Yiannas, Walmart’s vice president of food safety, challenged his team to discover where a batch of mangoes came from, the search took nearly a week. But using blockchain for supply chain management could digitize and track every step of the process with verified records. While the industry previously attempted to track inventory using RFID tags, the sensors proved cost-prohibitive at scale.
According to a statement from Vincent Clerc, chief commercial officer at Maersk, a new company represents a key milestone in their strategy to digitize global commerce. Annual worldwide shipments exceed $4 trillion in goods, with the ocean shipping industry transporting 80 percent of those products across international waters. The World Economic Forum reports that cutting costs and simplifying regulations could increase global trade by nearly 15 percent.
Disrupting Healthcare and Banking
In healthcare, blockchain is seen as an impetus for new business models, like treatment adherence and medical device monitoring. A November 2017 report by the Council of Economic Advisors, a White House agency, revealed that over 33,000 Americans died of opioid-related overdoses in 2015. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration passed the Drug Supply Chain Security Act to outline steps for an “electronic, interoperable system to identify and trace certain prescription drugs as they are distributed in the United States,” an initiative Mark Treshock of IBM says blockchain could help implement. Treshock noted that pharmaceutical companies could deploy blockchain well ahead of the FDA's 2023 deadline for implementing the DSCSA.
Banks are also eagerly exploring blockchain to achieve time, cost, and risk benefits for current business models. Fifty percent of Trailblazers—with Banking Trailblazers active across all major regions—anticipate new business models in capital markets, specifically in know-your-customer procedures, payments, and clearing and settlements. Compliance expert Gerhard Grueter says this is a critical development because smart contracts constitute one of the most critical applications of blockchain, providing full visibility across compliance checkpoints until all regulator requirements are met.
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