Blockchain is actually very useful in real life it can solve problems in a great way. We will discuss the top 6 blockchain real-world use cases. Here is the list of top blockchain technology use cases in the real world.
- Social Media
- Elections
- Supply chain
- Medical Records
- Art Industry
- Finance
Related: What Is Blockchain and Why blockchain was created?
Social Media
Censorship on social media is starting to be more and more of a problem. It’s a problem for democracy because not everybody can have their voices heard. It’s also a problem for creators who can get their social media sensors without much recourse possible but fortunately, blockchain can help. So with the blockchain-based social network, it will be completely censorship resistant.
Nobody could silence your voice but for this, to work there are some challenges. First, there are huge network effects for existing social media. So it would be really difficult to take users from let’s say Facebook or Instagram to a decentralized version of Facebook. Another problem is that storing data on the blockchain is very expensive. But on social media, we have a lot of data, especially with pictures and videos. So we do have a real-life example of a social media base on blockchain that’s called steemit. That’s a blogging system a little bit like a medium where the author can create articles and people can comment. It got some traction when it was released in 2017 but recently it became a bit dead.
Elections
So we all heard the claims of fraud in us. I don’t want to be involved in this debate but no matter what actually happens. It’s a real problem that some people don’t trust the voting system anymore. Unfortunately what happened in u.s politics always tends to happen in Europe a few years later. So it’s not just a problem for us but this is a worldwide problem. So if you want to preserve democracy we need to preserve the trust in the voting system.
Top blockchain technology use cases: So in 2021, it’s not acceptable to vote with an OPEC system when we can have total transparency on the blockchain. If we had an election on the blockchain nobody could dispute the result of an election. All the data of a blockchain is public everybody can verify it also nobody could do voter suppression with a blockchain-based system. To vote all you would need is a connection to the internet and its software and that’s it.
There are a couple of challenges with the blockchain base of the voting system. First to establish the identity of someone in the blockchain. We do need a centralized entity that’s going to associate an address on the blockchain to a real identity. Another big problem will be the resistance of politicians. Because they understand very well that with more voting on the blockchain people can vote directly for what they want and politicians are less needed.
So at the moment at the level of government, we don’t have any real-life example of voting, but you could start with a local election like for votation in Switzerland for example. In the industry of blockchain, we already have some governance that happened on the blockchain with DAO or decentralized autonomous organization. Which I use for the governance of a couple of crypto projects.
Supply chain
Top blockchain technology use cases: It’s estimated that the total value of the supply chain market is in the tens of trillion. So it’s really a big deal in the supply chain industry one of the main problems is how to have some traceability and establish that a product is authentic. It’s especially difficult if there are a lot of intermediaries. It requires a lot of reconciliation it’s slow it’s expensive and it’s prone to fraud. With a blockchain-based supply chain, it’d be much easier to track a product at the different stages of the supply chain in a really transparent manner. We have some blockchains that focus on the supply chain like a v-chain or Hadera hashgraph. But in terms, real-life adoption is not really used by the supply chain industry yet. So I’m expecting that it could start with luxury items. Because in this case is very very important to establish authenticity and after it could spread to another part of the supply chain industry.
Medical Records
Top blockchain technology use cases: In the medical industry the records of patients have to be shared across many different entities hospitals doctors insurance companies etc. Generally the system is very chaotic and opaque. If we use blockchain to share this data it could be much more transparent and also much cheaper to share data. That would be a way better experience for patients. but there is a big challenge by default the data on the blockchain is public, but in the medical industry, we do care about keeping the privacy of medical records. So we need some blockchain that can handle privacy well but unfortunately at the moment, we don’t have it yet.
Art Industry
It’s really sad that so many artists have to give up on their artistic careers because it doesn’t pay the bill. The industry is built in such a way that only the top artists are rich but all the rest staff. You also have a ton of intermediaries that take a lot of burning from artists. Can we do better with blockchain? With top blockchain technology use cases Yes with the blockchain we could allow artists to monetize their work way better without any intermediaries. An example of that is NFT or non-fungible tokens. NFT can be used to sell digital art on the blockchain.
The real innovation of NFT versus just selling a picture is that with NFT you can have scarcity. An artist can create an NFTwith just one copy that represents the ownership of the digital art. Because there is just one copy of this digital art it has value. That’s something that you cannot do with simple images outside of the blockchain. NFTs are totally blowing up right now like for this artist people that sold an NFT for 69 million dollars. We even had famous people who sold their tweets like the CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey who sold a tweet as an NFT for 3 million dollars.
Even outside of this group of superstars there is a long tale of lesser-known artists that are also able to sell the NFT. This is really huge because it means that a large part of artists can live off the artistic creation and not just be a cliche of the starving artist.
Finance
Finance is really the main use case for blockchain. This is really important because finance is such a central piece of the world economy. If you want to change the world we need to change finance and that’s what blockchain allows us to do. First of all with blockchain we can have digital gold. That’s what we have with bitcoin digital gold is better than the physical one because you don’t need to store it so it’s cheaper to own.
It is also with digital gold nobody can take it from you. Also with physical gold, we don’t know how much will be produced but with bitcoin we have a limited number of coins so it’s a much better store of value. Then with blockchain, another good thing we can do is bank the unbanked. If you are from a first-world country you probably don’t realize this because everybody has a bank account. But there are many people in the poorer countries that don’t have access to banking and you make it really difficult for them to save their money and escape poverty.
So with blockchain, everybody can be banked we don’t need anybody’s permission. Another use case is foreign remittances. So you have a lot of workers from the lower-income country. They go abroad to work and they send a part of their salary back home. To do this they use services like a western union that charges a lot of 10% or more and so there’s a lot of money that is taken from people who are already really poor.
Top blockchain technology use cases: So with blockchain, we can transfer money anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost. After that blockchain can totally reinvent the financial market that’s what we call defy or decentralized finance. Defy is better finance more open more transparent and more composable meaning that anybody can build on top of other defy projects. This is absolutely not the case with traditional finance. For example, you cannot go to see a bank and ask them if they have a public API that you can use if it doesn’t exist. So d5 is really huge right now on the Ethereum blockchain we have 45 billion dollars that are locked in d5 and now it starts to spread to another blockchain like an abandoned smart chain.
To give you some specific use cases for d5 first we have stablecoins which are crypto assets that always keep the same value. So it’s much better to be used in many financial applications also for commerce for payments. We also have decentralized exchanges or just decks like uni swap these allow you to extend your assets with other traders in a totally decentralized way without any KYC.
Related: What is P2E games? Play-to-earn NFT games
In d5 you can also land and borrow money in a totally decentralized way. You also have other things that are totally unique to defy that absolutely do not exist in traditional finance. Like flash loans that allow you to borrow a ton of money without providing any collateral. So to answer the initial question of the article is blockchain useful in real life? The answer is yes out of all the potential use cases for blockchain. There are two that really stand out and start to have some serious traction. I’m talking of NFT for artists and d5 or decentralized finance but before you can start understanding NFT and d5 the first step is to understand how blockchain work.
