7 Largest Industries Blockchain Will Change The Most

These seven have a potential to make the world unrecognizable. Cryptocurrencies not included.

Bitcoin is not blockchain’s end game.

If you have already digested the image of the future where every transaction is executed with digital money, you will have to stretch your imagination once again. There is an inexhaustive list of other-than-cryptocurrency uses of the distributed ledger technology, but we have picked the few that, with blockchain integrated, have a potential to change our world the most.

Read our we-tried-to-make-it-short overview and you will have no choice but make few adjustments to your picture of the future.

1. Voting

Designed to take on a technical issue of double-spending in cryptocurrencies, blockchain, in fact, can make any digital transaction traceable and irreversible and help tackle ‘double-voting’, as well. There are more problems in voting than unreliable counting of votes, though. Identity validation and voters’ eligibility, as well as lack of accountability of authorities, are resulting in meddling and government fraud. The legitimacy of elections is questioned more and more. Blockchain can handle them all. Digitization of voting can increase transparency and compliance of government officials, preventing fake elections and restoring democracy worldwide.

It might take a while until any government adopts a technology that will force it to be more transparent. Estonia was among the first to integrate it, but at corporate level, launching e-Residency, a voting program for shareholders’ meetings, in partnership with Nasdaq.

However, there was a local attempt to test it at government level, too. The blockchain’s compatibility with electoral process was checked trough Colombian project Plebiscito Digital, aimed at expats, who wanted to participate in 2016 election.

OECD’s takeaways were the following: there is strong resistance from political leaders and cultural aversion in public organizations, while both the population’s digital skills and the maturity of the blockchain technology itself are not sufficient yet.

“In the current climate of questioning the integrity of election processes, the potential of blockchain technology to radically change traditional voting systems is enormous. This example shows how a small experiment can point the way towards major potential future changes.”

Charlotte van Ooijen, OECD policy analyst

2. Human Rights

If people within financial system consider it unfair and obsolete, what would those not included say? Refugees without IDs and impoverished people without bank accounts are among those who are banished from financial system and suffer economic exclusion.

Billions of people wind up without access to conventional financial services, deprived from their human right not to only transact financially, but to receive humanitarian help when it is sent by international institutions.

“Identification panacea resulted in excluding billions of people from financial system. It is a toxic and fascist idea, that resulted in poverty and economic exclusion for billions of people and it hasn’t actually reduced fraud or allowed governments to stop crime and terrorism. It only means that people who can do massive crime against millions of people are those who are funded and supported by governments.”

Andreas M. Antonopoulos, the world’s top cryptoentusiast, author, professor at MSc in Digital Currencies, University of Nicosia

If the current system was working, why would have UN World Food Program sent Syrian refugees BTC vouchers to buy food? Because they saw blockchain to be a more trustworthy way to help financially without a risk to be affected by bureaucracy and international uncertainty. Now they are expanding from refugee aid in the Middle East to supply chain management in Africa.

3. Supply Chain Management/Food Industry

In the field of logistics, digitizing supply chain shipping will:

• increase the reliability of information and the process itself,
• optimize transit time and cost,
• reduce errors and fraud,
• increase quality of products,
• improve stock management.

How great the impact on society will be, becomes more apparent, when we take a closer look at particular industries affected, primarily, the industry of food. Implementing blockchain solutions here would make traceable the whole supply chain from a grower to a retailer, including storage and transport. Which means establishing a proof of food origin and freshness and decreasing the likelihood of contamination, or at least ensuring accountability in such a case.

Inspecting any product’s chain of custody from the raw materials to the end sale is the mission of the UK startup Provenance. Other examples of blockchain-based platforms for supply chain management are Jiocoin, SKUChain and Blockverify, with the last one focusing on anti-counterfeit measures in luxury goods, pharmaceuticals and diamonds.

4. Healthcare

Healthcare is a massive and heterogeneous industry that, with a right change implemented, can have one of the greatest impacts on future society blockchain can promise. Lack of standard processes, cross-institutional transparency, let alone access of patients to their medical history make today’s healthcare highly inefficient and costly, so there is large room for decentralization and standardization. And projects like MedRec, Ethereum-based multi-institutional storage of medical records by MIT, are just a first step. Besides making the data, stored on blockchain, easily available to patients and medical institutions, it can be handed over to researchers to accelerate the development of new and upgrade of existing drugs.

More projects: Gem, SimplyVital Health, MDigitalLife

“Blockchain technology presents numerous opportunities for health care; however, it is not fully mature today nor a panacea that can be immediately applied. Several technical, organizational, and behavioral economics challenges must be addressed before a healthcare blockchain can be adopted by organizations nationwide”.

Deloitte

5. Pension Funds

Developments in healthcare sector mean retirees will live longer, which is, of course, a good thing. In case they can afford it. Meanwhile, in some countries pension liabilities have already surpassed government debt in percentage of GDP. The pension savings gap will expand from $70 trillion in 2015 to $400 trillion by 2050, which probably makes this industry the largest of all that can be influenced by blockchain, and at the same time the shadiest. It means that, once disrupted by blockchain, it can change completely.

Decentralizing the records and making them more accessible and traceable will solve the problem of opaque spending by intermediaries. Blockchain can guarantee more efficient pension plan management, transparent proxy voting for reinvestment and unrestricted loans from retirement funds, now highly regulated by authorities. Speaking of investment, including the cryptocurrencies option to a pension plan should make having one more appealing to youngsters. Which is a good news, given that, as of today 66% of millennials are not saving up for retirement.

Akropolis is an alternative ecosystem that provides people with access and control over their pension funds, while transparency and security of transactions allows for better fund performance. A bonus feature is an opportunity to use Pension Coins as employees’ incentives and rewards.

6. Real Estate

Blockchain can democratize real estate industry in many ways. Mortgage, lease or other kind of ownership transfer process can be simplified:

• From the sell-side, by faster verification of property or land information such as chain of ownership, time of residency or repair track record,
• From the buy-side, by transparent credit history.

Time- and money-consuming third-party verifications, as well as services of bank and real estate agents will be no longer needed.

It might be a while before (if ever) a decentralized ledger replaces the current legacy paper system of tracking, recording and transferring deeds. Luckily, we don’t have to wait till that day, since a parallel system, like Ubiquity, can be already tested. There are also local projects that allow multi-property owners, real estate managers and housing associations can keep their assets in check in real time.

Another curious project is Alt.Estate, an investment platform for tokenized real estate. More examples: Bitfury, Velox.re, IHT Real.

7. Solar Energy

Energy is another large industry that is being suffocated from centralization, and when it comes to renewable energy, suffocated in the womb. The goal of blockchain integration here is not even to tackle monopolization by energy cartels, but to remove a third party from the process as such, making it as transparent as it can be. Blockchain allows a power plant owner and an electricity consumer to transact directly, recording and accessing the data on a decentralized storage anytime. As well as dispose of excess energy at their own discretion, without a necessity to sell it back to the power company.

The concept of peer-to-peer energy transactions is revolutionary, but not brand new. It’s been out there for more than 3 years and has spread over the world, tested by projects from Europe (Grid Singularity), the US (LO3 Energy), and Asia (Electrify.Asia, Energy Blockchain Labs).

As we have seen, these seven industries are enduring centralization and imposed practices that are outdated, ineffective or deliberately harmful. Although some more than others, all of them are suffering from the inner forces that control them with an iron feast. Blockchain is the only way to liberate them, and despite the technology being still immature, the first significant attempts to take on these forces have been already made.

Because the large and corrupt institutions that control these seven industries are the very ones that make them highly inefficient, barriers to integrate blockchain are tremendous.

The last thing that institutions, politicians and corporations will allow is the change of status quo. Ironically, in the industries where blockchain can have the most impact, it might take the longest to implement.

Polar criticism of blockchain applications

There is still a lot of scepticism about applicability of distributed ledger technology to other-than-crypto industries. In the interview to Quartz, Vitalik Buterin shares his concern for UN’s World Food Programme or a similar IBM initiative being just a waste of time. The attempts to integrate the technology don’t necessarily mean institutions or corporations are only using it for marketing hype, ‘people get genuinely excited about blockchains,’ but their necessity in other industries is questionable.

In supply chain management, for example, there is no 100% guarantee that ‘the actors there are doing it remotely correctly’ and someone isn’t putting deceitful information on the blockchain at the very start.

Buterin is convinced, that cryptocurrencies are still the most viable use of blockchain. But what else would we expect from the founder of the second world’s known cryptocurrency?

“All of the other ideas — whether we’re talking about products or the self-sovereign identity stuff — that’s clearly something that still needs much more time to be worked out before we can see [whether it] makes sense at scale.”

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Etherium

However, he admits that ‘blockchains definitely make it harder to contradict yourself’ and add on to existing guarantees. His favorite non-financial application is university degree authentication — common platform for institutions, that would mean no need to maintain their own infrastructure and bear a risk of it being hacked. (Sorry, Mike Rosses of the real world.)

At the same time, completely polar opinions on blockchain’s endgame exist. Beijing, for example, is eager to take a lead in developing blockchain technology, but warns against ‘mythologizing’ it, because sees cryptocurrencies as a threat to financial stability:

“Blockchain is a useful innovation but that doesn’t mean cryptocurrencies, which blockchain has given rise to, are necessarily useful”.

Fan Wenzhong, Head of China Banking International Department and Insurance Regulatory Commission

There is a common rationale in both arguments. We definitely shouldn’t blindly glorify cryptocurrencies and blockchain and mistake them for what there are not.

Conclusion

For blockchain to completely democratize the mentioned industries it will take much longer than the first experiments had assumed, and as they ultimately determined. Neither the environment, nor the technology itself is fully ready yet.

There are massive political, institutional and organizational barriers that exist, let alone technical and mental challenges that must be addressed, before a worldwide adoption of blockchain to solve existing problems across industries will become possible. But it only means we need more attempts and more effort to make, if we want to rewrite the status quo.

In the light of general disillusionment in cryptocurrencies, now can be the right time to shift the focus to the industries, where there is room for great change and where blockchain can serve the most.
And get ready for the long game this time.

Vanessa Emrith