Will Blockchain sustain irrespective of Bitcoin's price?
The roller-coaster ride known as cryptocurrency continues its slump once again. The highly volatile nature of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have made a serious impact on their investors. Will this factor has the potential to influence the industries from making their move towards blockchain architecture?
Lets answer this question after going through the trends which are taking the blockchain to next level.
Blockchain is proving its true potential by quickly becoming an established enterprise technology. There is still a long way to go, however, before reaching its full potential, blockchain architecture has attracted many enterprises. In this article, we shall look at some of the areas where blockchain can revolutionize the way in which they operate.
Related Article: What is Blockchain?
1. Blockchain For Printing
LINK3D, an Additive Manufacturing (AM) software company focused on software advancements for the 3D Printing Industry, has recently introduced an integration of blockchain technology in printing industry. For AM, blockchain technology offers a secured middleware to stabilize an untrusted distributed network that continues to gain momentum and attracted major industries. Blockchain architecture is now coupled with LINK3D’s SaaS product, Digital Factory that they launched in the year 2017. This is a major enhancement to the product that enables enterprises to apply data governance, identify data provenance and data validation
LINK3D discovered with Digital Factory that a digital thread is crucial for the mass adoption of AM. A seamless "strand" of information data that aids in the 3D printing process, from end-to-end, through conceptualization, design and production. The file integrity and traceability that blockchain provides is indispensable towards AM processes.
2. Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are a integral component in blockchain transactions. It is difficult to write smart contracts and they demand skilled blockchain professionals to accomplish the task. The scarcity in skilled blockchain professionals has increased the cost of hiring a blockchain developer and hence the cost cannot be borne by many aspiring blockchain startups.
Blockchain has the potential to become the disruptive force of the future, but still there are number of issues which are preventing it from reaching its true potential. There are many organizations which has understood the capability of blockchain and started investing to maximize their benefits. Enterprises also started brainstorming to overcome the shortcomings of blockchain.
iOlite, a blockchain platform allows anyone to write smart contracts without requiring them to be skilled on blockchain architecture. It helps the users by creating smart contracts via spoken language. iOlite uses mahcine trading algorithm based on language constructs by a global developers community.
3. IOT with BlockChain
Internet Of Things is one another area where the world will be moving towards in near future. It is one of the promising fields which guides us towards connected world. The principles of distributing the trust towards peer-to-peer network is and will continue to be essential in the world of IOT and edge computing.
Blockchain when combined with IOT will help in leveraging the services where trust cannot be compromised. It also enables running applications running in an edge economy that allows running apps anywhere rather than on a centralized data centers. Blockchain role will be to ensure the trust on the services and data exchanges that happen in an IOT environment.
4. Block-Chained Supply Chain
There is a constant raise in the number of blockchain apps which are being introduced but they also create a lot of noise since most of them fail to add any value to the industry. Many of them still remains proof-of-concepts (POCs) or white papers which do not throw much lights on how this new technology works and how it generates profit. It can be concluded that these apps are not commercial-ready.
Cryptocurrency is one of the first areas where blockchain implementation is successfully used. After cryptocurrencies, supply chain is another field where blockchain promises to revolutionize. One of the major drawbacks in current supply chain management is its lack of transparency. With blockchain architecture backing the supply chain management, it would become completely transparent. This will help in reducing the costs and frauds in the industry.
5. Data Provenance
In the area of data provenance, platform hosting the cloud native edge shall closely track immutably of who is creating the data, when it was created, and as the owner of that data what the owner’s rights are with regards to manipulating the data. A data provenance service shall allow an app developer to add devices to the network and have every piece of data tracked, enabling that data to be accessed by others, but not without the permission of the originator. This service shall be provided to that app by a platform via smart contracts and blockchain. Many enterprises have already started it in storing digital assets such as KYCs, etc.
Blockchain is not restricted to bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. It can be visualized as more powerful principle and cryptocurrencies are just a drop in the blockchain ocean. Soon we will start realizing the true potential of blockchain with the introduction of commercial-ready blockchain applications. I am confident that blockchain will sustain irrespective of bitcoin's success.
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