Technologies come and go, and the impact that they have on our lives can vary significantly. Some of them slightly simplify the habitual way of living and, by at large, stay barely visible. But sometimes a new technology is able to change the world we know once and for all, bring new possibilities and create new industries.

The blockchain application development which is currently on the rise has all chances to become a phenomenon that will not go unnoticed. It’s one of those things that gives lives to new professions and services that nobody was even able to imagine just yesterday. On the eve of a new era, the best thing that one can do is to prepare itself for the new reality and be ready to adapt. To help you with this task, we’ll consider which industries and in which way will be changed in the short term by the blockchain technology. This info will help you to outline the future state of affairs and better understand the upcoming prospects.

Financial Services

Despite the rapid evolution of the digital technologies, the architecture of money transfers has remained pretty static during the last 150 years or so. Blockchain allows creating more transparent and direct money flows between the payers and payees and eliminate the need for any intermediaries, which allows to make fees lower and increase the speed.

Banks work as complex systems that spend enormous resources on transferring and storing the money. The security of the storehouses and transfer hubs requires the efforts of thousands of employees. There are also significant costs associated with logistics. At the same time, the blockchain technology allows to get rid of unnecessary operations and provide you with the transparent way of managing your finances. The secure and decentralized nature of blockchain makes it possible to get access to the banking services even for those people who live in hard-to-reach regions. Bitcoin, the crypto-currency that is based on the blockchain technology allows sending money across the borders without any delays caused by the very nature of modern banks. When you want to send a certain amount of money to another country, you have to fill some forms, and wait until your money goes through the whole chain of intermediary banks, until they can reach the recipient’s account. The whole operation can take the significant amount of time, up to several days. In the case a bank employee makes a mistake, the overall transfer duration may increase significantly. The commission fees of all banks should also be taken into account. Blockchain, in its turn, provide you with fast, cheaper, and more easy to use as an alternative. For example, the UBS and Barclays look to the blockchain technology as a way to speed up some of the basic office operations and settlement that, according to calculations, can cut up to $20B in middleman costs.

Voting System

The emphasis on secure data transmission and transparency makes the blockchain technology a good candidate for the role of the main changer in the voting systems across the world. In recent years, almost every nation-wide election is accompanied by rumors and accusing of rigging election results. The blockchain can provide a secure mechanism that will allow to register voters, identify verification, store the records securely and count votes. The integrity of data is ensured by the decentralized nature of the blockchain technology. We can be completely sure that only legitimate votes are counted, and there’s not a single one of them that was changed or removed.

In this scheme, votes are represented as portions of data that are transmitted through the blockchain network. Such approach allows having a verifiable audit trail which can be used to ensure that the existing votes didn’t change and no fake votes were added.

Entertainment Industry

There’s a well-known issue associated with the payments in the entertainment industry. Sometimes it’s pretty hard to determine who owns the rights to a particular song, picture, music video, etc. Thus, it’s hard to ensure that every time a work of art is used in one way or another, the author will receive the payment according to the license used. Blockchain-based smart contracts are able to help with the royalty payments. Within the blockchain network, every data change requires the approval of all parties. That’s how the trust in ownership ensures in the case of smart contracts. The smart contract can be used to ensure that payment will be generated automatically and paid instantly. Such kind of transactions are broadcasted across the blockchain network immediately, so any involved stakeholder can instantly reflect this in his accounting.

Due to the widespread use of the broadband Internet, video and music streaming services have become a pretty popular source of entertainment. Although it’s great for users, as a musician you may be not so inspired by this technology. According to the report of Frontier Economics, the estimated value of digital piracy in music in 2015 was $29 Billion. So, you can imagine the amount of artists’ revenue losses caused by illegal downloading. Blockchain allows an artist to earn royalties without going through a record label. Smart contracts make content sharing fairer for the creator and allow to gather the revenue automatically without involving any third-parties. Some start-ups were created with the intention to help the artist to avoid possible revenue losses. For example, MYCELIA, a blockchain-based streaming platform that uses the described approach.

Supply Chain Management

When you transfer goods across long distances, the main factor that doesn’t allow cutting cost is the necessity to involve a lot of middlemen. In such case, you have to deal with series of transaction nodes that allow moving products from one point to another until it gets to the final point. It leads to additional time and money losses and increases the possibility of mistakes. Since smart contracts allow to decrease the need for intermediaries, all described inconveniences can be avoided. Using smart contracts, you can track product movement the whole way from the factory to the store shelves. With the help of the Internet of Things devices, you can track the current location of your goods. This info is used by the blockchain network to control the accuracy of the contract. Therefore, the whole supply chain becomes more transparent. If sent goods stuck at a certain point on the route, you’ll know about it instantly. Another application of this technology is the ability to reduce the risk of fraud and theft.

All the info related to the transportation process can be stored as a permanent decentralized record that can be monitored securely by any stakeholder. You can monitor costs with ease, every aspect of the delivery can be controlled, and the number of possible errors decreases significantly. IoT-devices even allow controlling the level of waste and emissions. Such possibility will be helpful in the case you want to control the environmental impact of your company not only on the phase of production but during the whole lifecycle of your product, including the delivering process.

Real Estate

Buying property is a life-making decision for most people. The vast amount of paperwork, high agent fees, lack of transparency, the possibility of fraud — all these factors are able to turn one of the happiest events in your life into something that you’ll try to forget as soon as possible.

The blockchain technology allows reducing the need for paper-based transactions. As a result, you can increase the efficiency and reduce the costs of transactions due to the elimination of unnecessary intermediaries. Everyone is able to manage, transfer, and track any required document such as property deeds or liens, for example.

Cyber Security

Since the blockchain technology is the basis for the bitcoin crypto-currency, the aspect of security wasn’t underestimated by the developers. There’s no way that you can convince people to trust you with their money if you can’t ensure that data is coming from where it should come, unmodified and it’s impossible to intercept it for a potential malefactor. All data transmitted through the blockchain network is encrypted using advanced cryptographic methodologies. Another feature of blockchain that helps to guarantee the high-security level is the absence of human intermediaries. As a result, the risk of hacking, willful data corruption, or human error is quite low.

The blockchain is able to provide the mechanisms, required for massive scale data authentication. Its Keyless Signature Infrastructure is used by the cybersecurity startup Guardtime for tagging and verifying data transactions for cryptographic assurance of their integrity and authenticity.

Car Leasing

The process of leasing or buying a vehicle can be pretty exhausting experience due to its fragmented nature. But in 2015 the Visa company started a partnership with the DocuSign startup which main intention was to simplify car leasing. A potential buyer can choose the car he wants to lease, and the transaction will be entered on the blockchain’s public ledger. If this customer decides to lease the car after the test drive, he can sign a lease agreement and an insurance policy right from the driver’s seat. The blockchain will be updated with this new information instantly.

The blockchain can also be used for creating decentralized peer-to-peer apps that allow sharing vehicles among the multiple drivers. Car owners and users can arrange the terms without involving any third-parties. Some startups allow you to try how the ridesharing works in practice. For example, you can check Arcade City or La’Zooz.

House Renting

You may wonder if there any possibility to “taste the future” and see how blockchain will change the way we’re dealing with the routine things. If so, you can take a look at a practical example of how smart contracts can be used. The Slock.it startup develops physical locks which have a digital existence on Ethereum, a platform featuring smart contract functionality. This project represents the new concept of sharing things. The smart rental contract allows opening the lock after receiving Ether, the value token of the Ethereum blockchain. So, if you want to rent a house or car, you can simply open the app, find the object of interest, transfer money to the smart contract, and use it. In this scenario, you can use a single key for everything, your smartphone. Developers are currently working on the Universal Sharing Network (USN), an open source infrastructure on which blockchain applications modules can be deployed. Any object from this network can be found, located, rent and controlled by users.

Conclusion

As you can see, the blockchain technology has already affected almost every aspect of our routine life. In the future, its impact will only grow which will lead to the appearing of new perspectives and destroying the archaic forms of relationships. The best strategy in the given scenario is to keep one’s hand on the pulse of life and be ready to adapt.

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