Blockchain and smart contracts are touted as solutions for everything from supply chain management to secure voting systems. These tools promise transparency and automation. We discussed real-world use cases of smart contracts in a previous article. Below, we provide a detailed overview of these and other use cases.
Blockchain in Transportation
Automate toll payments, manage ride-sharing contracts, and enable transparent, real-time tracking of vehicles and goods.
Traffic Reduction: In a blockchain-based ITS, users share traffic conditions for specific locations and suggest better routes for others. This system can be compromised if security issues arise, affecting the accuracy and reliability of shared data.
Payments: Blockchain can manage transport-related payments such as bus tickets, vehicle registrations, and parking fees. This ensures secure transactions and opens new opportunities for smart contract-based transportation scenarios, providing peace of mind to drivers and passengers.
Energy Exchange: For unmanned aerial vehicles and connected electric vehicles, blockchain supports a secure and efficient energy exchange system. It approves energy requests via mining nodes and a software-defined backbone controller, ensuring valid and energy-efficient transactions.
Data Distribution: Blockchain enhances smart transportation by managing real-time responses, such as route distribution and safety management. It eliminates the need for a central authority in vehicular communication systems, enabling dynamic and secure key management, improving efficiency and performance.
Blockchain in IoT
Facilitate secure communication between IoT devices, automate actions based on smart contracts, and manage decentralized networks.
Smart City: Smart cities use diverse IoT-based systems for various applications. To address single-point failures in IoT devices, a blockchain-based authentication protocol registers devices on a private blockchain, bypassing the need for a central authority.
Industrial Sector: Blockchain and IoT enhance industrial productivity, efficiency, and transparency by sharing real-time data from sensors in a decentralized manner. As sensor prices drop, this technology becomes increasingly accessible.
Supply Chain: Blockchain and IoT can resolve supply chain issues like late deliveries and untrustworthy intermediaries by digitizing and automating processes, tracking shipments, and removing paperwork, thus enhancing efficiency and reliability.
Autonomous Vehicle: Sensors on autonomous vehicles capture data on the IoT platform, connected to a blockchain. This ensures trust and transparency in service requests like refueling or repairs, recorded via blockchain-based transactions.
Plant Asset Manufacturing Management: IoT sensors in manufacturing detect failures due to heat or vibration. Blockchain enhances proactive management, ensuring reliability and data integrity without third-party involvement.
Trust Management: A three-layer blockchain-based trust architecture ensures data integrity and interconnectivity in IoT applications. It dynamically manages security keys and assigns trust and reputation points based on interactions.
BeeKeeper: The BeeKeeper system uses blockchain and IoT to manage data like a beekeeper manages honey. It encrypts and verifies data without needing to know the details, using threshold secure multiparty computing for enhanced performance.
Smart Agriculture: Blockchain and IoT improve food traceability from production to storage, ensuring food safety and reducing human error. This helps address health issues caused by toxic chemicals, packaging, and poor production practices.
Smart Contract: Smart contracts in IoT manage firmware updates, balance device workloads, and optimize smart grids. Blockchain integration reduces device limitations through communication, consensus, data, and application layers.
Blockchain in Financial Management
Streamline cross-border payments, automate portfolio management, and enhance transparency in financial transactions and auditing.
Banking: Blockchain applications in banking can cut transaction and intermediary costs by $20 billion, offering services like accounts and loans via platforms like Corda, which provides secure banking without intermediaries.
Cost Reduction: Capgemini estimates blockchain could save up to $16 billion in banking and insurance fees by eliminating the need for intermediaries. Various blockchain services reduce transaction costs globally.
Product Traceability: A blockchain-based supply chain system ensures product traceability using smart contracts. Tokens represent goods, and their creation, modification, and transfer are managed on the blockchain, ensuring authenticity.
Loan Management System: The Loan on Blockchain (LoC) system enhances data protection and transaction transparency using smart contracts. It automates loan execution, secures transactions with digital signatures, and manages participants through a blockchain-based network.
Corporate Trading: Blockchain in corporate trading offers transparency, faster transactions, and reduced costs by eliminating middlemen. Smart contracts can restrict visibility to protect sensitive trades, benefiting shareholders and investors.
Tourism: Blockchain can verify user profiles, reducing fraudulent reviews and enhancing trust in the travel industry. Researchers are developing blockchain applications for seamless tourism processes, as seen in C2C models like Airbnb and Uber.
Climate Protection: Blockchain can help combat global warming by reducing paperwork and human activities. It can support initiatives like REDD+ by managing cryptocarbon, green finance, and sustainable investments, potentially reducing warming by 4°C by 2050.
Blockchain in Security and Privacy
Implement decentralized security protocols, protect data integrity, and automate incident response using smart contracts.
Healthcare: Blockchain securely stores patient medical records, images, and documents. An access control manager and database system encrypt and timestamp data, allowing authorized administrators to access them. This ensures privacy and security.
Financial Sector: Blockchain, the backbone for Bitcoin, encrypts data, uses private and public keys, and ensures data traceability and immutability. It secures transactions with hash values, providing data consistency and nonrepudiation.
Internet of Things: Blockchain in IoT ensures data storage and security, allowing remote access and storage from any device. It uses unique identifiers and private keys to protect data, facilitating secure communication between digital devices.
Defense Sector: Blockchain encrypts confidential defense data and uses secure hashing and consensus mechanisms to protect against cyberattacks. It ensures data authenticity and prevents alterations, securing secret documents and weapon plans.
Mobile Applications: Blockchain enhances security in mobile apps through secure device-to-device communication, data transfer, and payments. It provides a secure protocol for transferring sensitive data and ensures privacy during money transfers.
Automobile Industry: Blockchain improves vehicle communication safety by using a decentralized architecture with encryption, hash values, and block numbers. It prevents single points of failure and secures data communication between smart vehicles.
Blockchain in Healthcare
Securely manage patient records, automate insurance claims, and ensure the integrity of drug supply chains with smart contracts.
Electronic Health Records: Blockchain securely stores and analyzes EHRs, helping identify quacks and ensuring flexible services. Estonia’s Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) allows access to public health records without third parties, improving patient data management.
Telemedicine: Blockchain connects patients and telemedicine, securing medical records with hash values and block numbers. Platforms like MedRec share health data between Israel’s medical center and MIT’s Media Lab, ensuring data security and immediate patient care.
Expenses and Services: Traditional hospital management systems often miscalculate treatment costs, affecting service quality. Blockchain mitigates these issues by ensuring accurate cost management and improving hospital services.
Drug Supply Chain: Drug supply companies face losses and liability from counterfeit drugs. Blockchain tracks products and measures drugs accurately, enhancing supply chain management and ensuring patient safety.
Hygiene Research: Researchers need extensive data on diseases. Blockchain stores patient health records and links them to healthcare networks, making research processes more efficient and flexible.
Blockchain in Society Infrastructure and Government
Simplify processes like license issuance, tax collection, and public record management with transparent and automated workflows.
Individual Identity: Traditional systems store personal records separately, leading to inconsistencies. Blockchain solves this by recording information permanently at a single point, ensuring access and reliability, especially for refugees and immigrants.
E-Residents: Estonia’s electronic residency system, introduced in 2014, offers a borderless digital identity accessible worldwide. The Bitnation project uses blockchain for a virtual nation, enabling global communication through public key infrastructure.
Land and Property Registry: Blockchain-based smart contracts streamline property transactions, confirming ownership and financial status quickly. This reduces human error and fraud, ensuring secure and efficient land and property registration.
Birth , death and Marriage Certificates: Blockchain can permanently store vital records like birth, marriage, and death certificates, ensuring the accuracy and immutability of citizen data in automated systems.
Vehicle Registrations: Blockchain stores vehicle mileage and history records permanently, preventing sellers from cheating buyers. Buyers can verify a car’s history using its Vehicle Identification Number (VIN).
Voting Records: Blockchain enhances voting systems by ensuring each vote is recorded accurately and can be verified by the voter. It uses consensus protocols to detect fraud and prevent alterations, improving election integrity.
Blockchain in Education
Verify academic credentials, manage student records, and automate course registration and tuition payments on a secure platform.
Certificate Management: Blockchain applications for education manage academic certificates without third-party assistance. Such as a blockchain-based certificate management platform for secure and efficient record handling.
Data Science: Blockchain can revolutionize data management and processing. The European Data Science Academy offers training with interactive tools, including a blockchain smart badge system as part of the course to enhance knowledge and skills.
Student Loan Management: Blockchain smart contracts streamline student loan management by linking repayment to performance and salary. Systems like Social Finance (SoFi) and SALT Lending use blockchain to reduce processing time, documentation, and costs.
Additionally
– Secure and protected data on students and/or departments
– Access restriction can be effectively defined
– Transparency between data is preserved
-Trust is created among all users
-Costs are reduced
-Students’ and resource owners’ identities can be authenticated
-Student´s performance can be evaluated efficiently and quickly
All these blockchain applications promise to revolutionize transportation, healthcare, or governance but add another layer of complexity to an already convoluted world. They can reduce some inefficiencies, cut out a few middlemen, or make processes more transparent. We may gain some peace of mind knowing a smart contract governs our property transaction or that our vote is securely stored on the blockchain.
While the impact on management and business is compelling, and being early may offer a competitive edge, the real challenge lies in navigating the added complexity these technologies bring. It’s not just about adopting blockchain and smart contracts for efficiency; it’s about understanding their limitations and integrating them thoughtfully into a world that remains far from simple.
