Blockchain is best known as the technology behind digital currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum, but while its role in cryptocurrency gets the most attention, blockchain is much more than just an instrument of finance. Cryptocurrency is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to blockchain technology. If we dive a little deeper, we discover a far-reaching revolution that is beginning to heavily impact the way we do business.
“Blockchain has already built a strong foundation to drive change,” Kirill Timofeev, Principal Consultant at DataArt, told Generis Group in an interview ahead of the American CIO & IT Summit 2019.
Over the past several years, blockchain has achieved widespread attention and has been evaluated across multiple domains ranging from finance and governance services to healthcare and lifesciences. “It creates a new asset class that powers decentralized solutions. Those applications have little to do with digital currencies and are not competitors to fiat money,” Timofeev says. “Blockchain is a new model, a new form of software, and that being said, it’s not better or worse than traditional applications and technologies. It is different.”
In 2019, Timofeev expects to see more projects apply blockchain processes that are not directly related to payments or cryptocurrencies. The finance industry, in particular, is expected to see a surge in R&D and implementations focused on the exploration of permissioned blockchains and applications of smart contracts that target inefficiencies and delays in business flows. In other industries, the uses of blockchain range from voting systems to insurance policies.
“Blockchain is a foundational technology that addresses the competitive challenges many companies face, including trends of digitalization and moving away from legacy and paper-based processes across multiple organizations,” Timofeev says. Below is a list of projects that currently use blockchain technologies to streamline their processes:
E-proxy voting system: Ensures a secure and transparent voting process for corporate actions such as fully automated and secure voting, process transparency and traceability for voting participants and auditors
Blockchain-based car services: Creates an ecosystem that helps to deal with insurance and service bureaucracy, eliminates the necessity to prove accident details, and adds clarity to car sales operations by logging the condition of the car and state of purchase to speed up transactions.
Lottery/Fundraising: This solution as a service combines gambling, charity and blockchain. It creates a ledger of financial transactions for gamblers, and encourages social responsibility through transparent fundraising that generates trust amongst donors. A blockchain business model is aimed at empowering not-for-profit innovation.
Travel delay coverage application: A blockchain system will create smart contracts between passengers and insurance companies. In the event of a flight delay or cancellation, the passenger receives an immediate insurance payout.
Reinsurance/Insurance: Implementing a blockchain solution helps manage global corporate insurance policies across a complex chain of intermediaries and local versions of the global policy. It uses a special document management solution to build global templates and manages adaption of the global policy conditions found in local chapters with varying rules, translations and procedures.
Blockchain implementation across industries still has a way to go, but 2019 is set to be the turning point. Timofeev says, “No longer is blockchain a mysterious and overhyped technology trialed only by the few. It is a technology embraced by industry leaders who are committed to its potential to transform businesses and industries far beyond its modest cryptocurrency and bitcoin origins.”
Click here to see the full interview with DataArt’s Kirill Timofeev.