The Benefits of Using Blockchain Technology for Business

It’s hard to imagine the modern world without secure online transactions and all the transformations they insert. We will mention below the benefits of blockchain that hugely influence the reality of lots of industries. Certainly, all this situation leads to new business opportunities in relation to security, advanced accountability, higher efficiency, and transparency.

What You Should Know about Blockchain 

“What the internet did for communications, I think blockchain will do for trusted transactions.” — this quote belongs to the CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty, and we couldn’t agree more.

Briefly, we can describe the blockchain as a shared, incommutable, peer-to-peer ledger of transactions. Practically, this means that new information can be written onto the ledger, but previous information, saved in blocks, cannot be changed or edited.

Suppose you are still hesitant, why blockchain is important and what are the advantages of blockchain technology for your business, in our article. In that case, we leave no gap between dry theory and pathos, immersing you deep into the practical details.

What Blockchain is Primarily for

Today, when people hear about blockchain, they mostly think about cryptocurrency and how blockchain benefits here. But let’s reshape this association by giving a few examples where blockchain eliminates problems in other domains.

• Fintech and trade. Here, blockchain technology helps establish new trading partnerships and open new liquidity pools, thus creating new businesses. Now it is trustable because of smart contracts, enhanced security, distributed ledger technology, and extensive control capabilities for real-time access to trade finance data.
• Intellectual Property. The illegal use as well as theft of intellectual property, such as scientific research and their findings  — huge problems of the present-day world, that we have to grapple with. However, projects such as ARTiFACTS – where we were technical partners – or CREA allow people of creativity and science to share their content online and prove that they are the creators of that content and therefore have all the intellectual property rights.
• Voting process. It is complicated to disagree that there are enough contradictions around the elections. If the voting procedure is conducted using blockchain technology, there will be no question about the validity of the results since all records in the decentralized ledger are irreversible. The whole COVID-19 situation has accelerated the transition to online voting.
• Item Histories and Logistics. The technology can help us track the item history back to its source so that invisible interference will not be possible. Also, by using trusted blockchain data, manufacturers can track the component’s path and finished items. Thus it works for a retailer or vendor as well — they can track compliance with rules and standards at each stage of the chain.
• Government Procedures. The fact of blockchain technology using from the perspective of state structures would allow citizens to be sure that no transactions or odd deals were sewn up off the record.

Of course, one can use blockchain in many other following projects: cloud storage, currency and transaction support, insurance, real estate, crowdfunding, charity.

Top Advantages of Blockchain Technology

Discover new business and industry opportunities by applying the capacity of the blockchain benefits, thus building trust and rewiring your business.

1. Higher efficiency. As there is no labor-intensive process prone to human error, mistakes, no need to enable payment systems, and the number of third-party mediation is reduced — transactions are processed much faster than usual. Optimization and automation of these processes owing to the use of blockchain, allowing more efficient completion of operations.

2. Advanced traceability. Suppose your company is dealing with a traded product with a complicated supply chain. In that case, the blockchain helps you to get an audit trail every time an item exchange is registered on the block diagram, which shows where the asset came from and every stop on its way.

3.Security. With digital signature and transaction encryption, the blockchain is much more secure than other storage systems. Once a transaction is approved, encrypted, and linked to the previous one — it can no longer be corrected because it’s impossible to change a complex string of mathematical numbers once formed.

4. Transparency. The transaction history becomes more transparent because of the blockсhain technology, as the transaction ledger for public addresses is open for viewing. Distributed ledgers allow network parties to share the same documentation – and this shared edition can only be updated with everyone’s permission. If there is a change in one transaction record, it will lead to changes in all the following records and the entire network’s collusion. In financial systems and businesses, this adds a level of responsibility, as every sector of the business is committed to behaving honestly towards the company’s growth, its community, and its customers. 

Blockchain is Revolutionary, but…

Besides all the advantages that blockchain brings, you should realize when and why this technology is not a path you should take. So, blockchain technology is not an appropriate solution in the following cases:

1. Mutual trust of participants. Sometimes a blockchain may be the right choice in designing a software system, but traditional technologies will be more suitable for many purposes. If a system is used only within a single organization or organizational unit, it is rarely advisable to create it on the blockchain.

2. Publicity and speed are essential. Well-known, public blockchains are slow because of the limited network bandwidth and a large number of users. For instance, Visa is capable of processing more than 2000 transactions in a second.

3. Limited implementation costs. If you can relate, you should remember the following:

• more electricity consumption ( the massive redundancy in a large number of processing nodes in a blockchain system will always mean that more electricity is used than in a centralized non-replicated database);
• more expensive development (hourly rates of blockchain developers are higher significantly);
• usually, each transaction in public blockchain networks is a paid service.

NIX expertise — Practical Cases Using Blockchain Technology 

NIX has experienced cases on blockchain technology in different domains, so let us immerse you into two success stories of ours — when blockchain benefits.

Case #1: Child Medical Record — Health Info Management and Medical Records Request 

Our team managed a challenging task to create and confidentially maintain health information about a patient while there are several independent participants in the process. In our case, there were three entities: Hospital – Parents – Elementary School.

We created a network and distributed the rights between different parties in it. Our health platform enables participants to do three critical things:

• to secure private info between entities;
• to provide confidentiality that can be maintained by agreement about which sides can see which medical records;
• to limit access to sensitive information on children’s medical records.

Please find out more information in our detailed case study.

Case #2: ARTiFACTS — Blockchain Platform for Scientific & Academic Research

The researchers driving big science need better access to results sooner to solve the most significant challenges. There were the following barriers:

• most findings, including negative results, remain hidden and inaccessible;
• the provenance of the research results is not ensured;
• scientists don’t share because they are waiting to publish;
• no mechanism for recognizing contributions other than published papers.

Using the ARTiFACTS platform, researchers can prove their ownership, the existence of new work, and provide access to this work for like-minded researchers to discover, use, and, even more importantly, provide real-time attribution and quoting. The platform generally helps them quickly create and showcase their research contributions — without waiting for a lengthy publication cycle with no guarantee of acceptance.

To learn more about the Artifacts project — look through our extended case study.

How to Pump Your Business Properly

NIX experts implement optimal Blockchain solutions, depending on the clients’ needs and requirements for different domains with high security, confidentiality, and scalability. 

We know precisely why blockchain isn’t for every client, so we won’t use its capabilities if it doesn’t add value to the business. Applying blockchain as a part of a solution, you should be confident that this technology solves your main problem point. It’s easy to be confused about the right solution, but our experts will help you understand all the pros and cons of each solution.