Blockchain Applications in Money

Cryptographic digital currencies allow for a new system of robust, transparent, and efficient monetary management.

From a technology perspective, existing monetary systems require paper-based cash or utilizing a private third party service (e.g. Visa, American Express) to send money far distances. From an economic perspective, holders of government issued currencies (e.g. United States Dollar, European Euro) are required to trust centralized authorities that overall monetary valuations will remain stable and that online transfers or holdings cannot be seized.

The advent of cryptographic digital money has leapfrogged over this archaic system by using blockchain technologies to create a new truly person-to-person (Peer-to-peer) environment of money transfer. There is no need for a centralized party to control a cryptocurrency, nor is there any type of restrictions or rules of usage. Cryptocurrencies provide people across the globe with instant, secure, and frictionless money.

Blockchain Money Definition

Cryptographic digital currencies use cryptography and blockchain technologies to provide anybody with an internet connection, with global, nearly-instant, and frictionless money. This is possible by using advanced encryption and blockchain technologies to provide a robust and secure network of money management.

Blockchain Applications in Financial Services

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) allow the entire financial services industry to dramatically optimize business processes by sharing the data in an efficient, secure, and transparent manner.

Blockchain technologies are reshaping the landscape of financial services. Existing inefficient business models and profit pools are beginning to face risk of disruption by upstart highly efficient blockchain-based platforms. Substantial benefits are to be gained using blockchain technologies, especially in back-office operations and to improve transparency, which is highly favored from an audit and regulatory perspective. Those harnessing these advancements are set to have key competitive advantages in the financial services industry industry in the coming years.

The existing capital markets infrastructure is slow, expensive, and often requires several intermediaries. Many new blockchain capital market inventions are entering the market, such as ‘Smart Bonds.’ Smart bonds can automatically pay the bondholder their coupons once preprogrammed conditions are met. These new types of financial product (often called ‘Smart Securities’) are made possible by ‘Smart Contracts’ which are digital contracts that are translated into computer programs and have the ability to be self-executing and self-maintaining, requiring no need for human maintenance.

Blockchain Financial Services Use Cases

Blockchain technology can be applied to financial services in the following areas:
Smart Securities via Smart Contracts

1.Post Trade Processing and Settlement

2.Loan Origination and Servicing

3.Foreign Exchange Markets

4.Derivatives Markets

5.Record-Keeping Processes

6.Auditing and Corporate Compliance

7.Corporate Shareholder Voting

8.Reducing Counterparty Risk

9.Cross-Border Payments

Many More

Blockchain Applications in Internet of Things (IoT)

Blockchain technology is the missing link to settle scalability, privacy, and reliability concerns in the Internet-of-Things.

According to Cisco, 50 billion devices are due to come online by 2020. With so many connected devices all sending, receiving and processing instructions to turn on, dial down and move up, the sheer amount of data due to come on-stream could come with unprecented costs. Other issues include how exactly we can track and manage billions of connected devices, storing the metadata that these devices produce, and do it all reliably and securely. Before mainstream Internet-of-Things consumer adoption can really take hold, these issues will need to be resolved.

Blockchain technologies could perhaps be the silver bullet needed by the IoT industry. Blockchain technology can be used in tracking billions of connected devices, enable the processing of transactions and coordination between devices, allow for significant savings to IoT industry manufacturers. This decentralized approach would eliminate single points of failure, creating a more resilient ecosystem for devices to run on. The cryptographic algorithms used by blockchains, would make consumer data more private.

Blockchain Internet of Things (IoT) Use Cases:

1.Connected Vehicles

2.Smart Appliances

3.Supply Chain Sensors

Bitmain AntRouter R1
First Bitcoin Internet-of-Things Product

The AntRouter R1 is a wireless networking device containing a bitcoin mining chip. The R1 is preconfigured to mine on AntPool's solo mode, meaning that as long as the device is powered, you are competing for a chance to solve a block and win about the entire block reward of 25 bitcoins(after deducting the 1% fee).

Blockchain Applications in Music

Blockchain technologies streamline ownership rights and provide fair payment for musician’s work, by bringing transparency to all.

Key problem areas in the music industry include transparency, clarity of ownership, and royalty distributions. Ever since online music sharing began, the industry has struggled with finding new ways to monetize digital music files that have now become non-scarce digital goods. The basic information that is needed to identify who wrote, performed, and owns the music that you listen to, is frequently overlooked. This data and its accuracy are vital to ensuring that creators and owners get paid for their work. Furthermore, the antiquated copyright databases and complex system of royalty collections make it orders of magnitude more difficult to get music from legitimate sources.

By utilizing blockchain technology and smart contracts to create a comprehensive and accurate decentralized database of music rights, the possibility for instantaneous and totally transparent transmission of artist royalties, including realtime distributions to co-writers, producers, technology partners, publishers, and even labels is now a possibility. This would involve creating an entirely new system, where scenarios exist in which you could pay for only the amount of the song that you listen to could be created. Or payments in real time at a micro scale could exist (another great feature of Bitcoin). Most important, blockchain smart contracts ensure each time a payment is generated for a given work, the money would be automatically split according to the set terms, and each party’s account would instantly reflect the additional revenue.

Blockchain Applications in Real Estate

In a mostly paper-record based industry, blockchain real estate allows for a significant gain in efficiency in how records are stored and recorded.

The real estate industry as a whole historically lags in adopting new technology, with many paper based documents exchanged. Should the real estate industry choose to adopt blockchain technologies for essential functions such as payment, escrow, and title, this could create unprecedented efficiencies and cost savings. Furthermore, implementation of this technology can reduce fraud, increase financial privacy, speed up transactions, and internationalize markets.

Blockchain technology can play a particularly prominent role in property title management, providing improved property ownership record tracking, and improve efficiencies for title companies, title insurance companies and all manners of data-retrieval services with employees who trek to town, county and state government offices to pull information from paper files.

Blockchain Applications in Identity

Blockchain technologies makes tracking and managing digital identities both secure and efficient, resulting in seamless sign-ons and reduced fraud.

Be it banking, healthcare, national security, citizenship documentation, online retailing or walking into a bar, identity authentication and authorization is a process intricately woven into commerce and culture worldwide. Due to the lack of common comprehension and often-unchecked cyberspace of personal information, Identity in the context of technology is facing significant hurdles. Events such as hacked databases and breached accounts are shining light on the growing problems of a technologically advanced society, without outpaced identity-based security innovations.

Alongside biometrics, blockchain technology offers a solution to many digital identity issues, where identity can be uniquely authenticated in an irrefutable, immutable, and secure manner. Current methods use problematic password-based systems of shared secrets exchanged and stored on insecure systems. Blockchain based authentication systems are based on irrefutable identity verification using digital signatures based on public key cryptography. In blockchain identity authentication, the only check performed is whether or not the transaction was signed by the correct private key. It is inferred that whoever has access to the private key is the owner and the exact identity of the owner is deemed irrelevant.

Blockchain Identity Use Cases

Blockchain technology can be applied to identity applications in the following areas:
Digital Identities

1.Passports

2.E-Residency

3.Birth Ceritificates

4.Wedding Certificates

5.IDs

6.Online Account Logins

Many More