Here’s a brief look at how organizations across a wide range of industries are actively using blockchain technology today.
Decentralizing Supply Chain And Manufacturing Management
Supply chains are notoriously fragmented, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. Executives are facing dampened efficiency and output, and a disjointed view of their entire system prevents them from maximizing the value of moving goods.
Blockchain technology brings all businesses within a given supply chain into a more equitable model and provides the opportunity to create unified, transparent systems without compromising data security or integrity. It reduces operational overhead across massive teams and stores data in a decentralized, immutable manner that ensures security at all points along the supply chain. Further, this unified view of data can bring all parties onto the value chain—long a sticking point in supply chain economics. It’s no surprise, then, that, according to Market Research Future (MRFR), blockchain in the supply chain market is expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 50% till 2030.
Tokenizing Financial Assets To Make Data More Accessible And Profitable
Increasingly, the financial services industry is pioneering some of the most significant blockchain use cases today. Among other areas, financial tokenization has emerged as a key use case for a growing number of banks, insurers and more. Financial service providers are experimenting with the tokenization of financial products and the coding of loan parameters into smart contracts to realize secure and verifiable settlements of securities, more efficient and higher quality data for digital securities and critically, verifiable, real-time audits (a topic the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants explored in great depth). All of this combines to reduce asset costs and increase operational liquidity—areas that every financial services firm is constantly focused on optimizing.
Increasing Customer Engagement For Retailers
The $6 trillion e-commerce market is still growing, and retailers of all sizes are throwing out their old engagement playbooks to attract and retain loyal customers more efficiently than ever. Rather than waiting for the customer to make the first move, blockchain technology enables retailers to securely generate identity-linked offers based on target metrics while maintaining pseudonymity for consumers in a way that doesn’t compromise key personal information.
NFT-based coupons are catered specifically toward each unique user and can integrate directly into a retailer’s website and be instantly applied at checkout, which helps reduce cart abandonment. By storing customer transactions on a secure and tamper-proof ledger, blockchain also makes it easier than ever to resolve disputes in a timely manner while simultaneously reducing the risk of transaction fraud.
It’s no mystery why some of the world’s largest retailers, including Amazon, Alibaba and Walmart, have invested in blockchain technology in recent years.
What Comes Next?
Like any emerging technology, there is certainly an adoption curve with blockchain that mirrors what we saw with personal computing, cloud computing and even the internet itself. Change doesn’t happen all at once, and we’re only scratching the surface of how blockchain can transform business, but we’ve undoubtedly passed the adoption tipping point. From here, we can expect to see a proliferation of companies that exist to work directly with enterprise organizations—a key step to facilitating broader adoption. It’s the same trend that played out with the rise of operating systems (Microsoft, Red Hat and many others), cloud computing (AWS et al.) and more—and it’s happening with blockchain, too.
Enterprises of all sizes and verticals are beginning their blockchain journeys in earnest. At this point, we can conclusively say that it has clearly evolved from curiosity to IT mainstay.
