Blockchain-a Game Changer For Multiple Industries

This story appears in the January 2023 issue of Entrepreneur India. Subscribe » You’re reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Blockchain tech­nology is gaining ground by the day. And while it’s true that its synonymous with cryptocurrencies as the latter is the most widely accepted use case of blockchain, we cannot ignore the fact that it is game-changer for multiple in­dustries, including BFSI, edu­cation, healthcare, real estate, supply chain & logistics, and iot. Blockchain’s popularity and applications are skyrocket­ing due to its innate qualities – the decentralized and distrib­uted ledger is immutable and completely transparent.

Freepik

My favourite is personal identity security, which paves the way for self-sovereign identity. To navigate through the mass Web 3.0 adoption, each of us needs a digital self-sovereign identity neither bestowed nor revocable by any central authority and enforceable in every context, in person and online, anywhere in the world.

ADOPTION

The World Economic Forum (WEF) forecasts that, by 2027, 10% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) will likely be stored on DLTs. The global blockchain technology market was valued at USD 5.92 billion in 2021 and is ex­pected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 85.9% from 2022 to 2030. DeFi is an emerging financial technology based on block­chain, reducing banks’ control over financial services and money. The growing strategic initiatives in the decentralized finance space are expected to drive market growth in the coming years.

Also, with the arrival of the Metaverse, blockchain technology is becoming more significant, as cryptocurren­cies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will enable purchases and value storage in virtual reality. India is undoubtedly ahead of the curve and will only prosper in the coming decade, be it blockchain, AI or AR/VR.

CHALLENGES

Blockchain’s pseudonymous nature needs a robust regulato­ry framework to avoid criminal activity like money laundering. Unfortunately, there are no consistent regulations around the world. This lack of clarity and guidance makes navigat­ing blockchain integration tricky. Governments and enterprises worldwide are pre­paring to acquire blockchain solutions and hence need to gain the knowledge or frame­work to assess a blockchain. Consequently, they will always default to a traditional solution provider. Newer, agile, and innovative companies cannot compete with conventional government vendors. For this reason, GBA established the blockchain maturity model, to provide a roadmap to estab­lish, implement, maintain, and continually improve block­chain solutions.

BENEFITS TO GOVERNMENT

Fostering trust in government processes requires transparent operations. Data hacks and stolen identities have become a sad part of today’s reality. And as a by-default record manager of society, governments have become the main target of hackers globally. Blockchain data structure strengthens the network’s security by eliminating the scope of the single point of failure errors, making the system unhackable. Land transactions and proof-of-ownership requests burden government agencies with documentation and administrative work. Conventional legal-contract execution is costly to both governments and their citizens.

SUSTAINABILITY

Unfortuntely,blockchain is still synonymous with bitcon instead of a broad group of diverse technologies. High energy consumption is not intrinsic to blockchain technol­ogy in general. Since 2009, numerous new and existing blockchain projects have been exploring everything from mi­grating to less energy-intensive validation systems to explor­ing renewable energy-based mining.