The Blockchain is an open-source technology providing us with an alternative to the traditional intermediary by replacing it with a distributed ledger that can be collectively verified offering a massive degree of speed, traceability, and security. Blockchain as a concept is not much more. Complexities lie in the implementation and tapping into the value from these implementations.
The promise for the average consumer is that it gives us a new level of freedom, empowerment and allows us to reach others without having intermediaries in the middle to control, censor, or tax by taking a fee or cut from us. Moreover, it allows us to control our identity. Every consumer can remain anonymous, public or private. They can own their identity and not have it owned by Google or Facebook. For you, it can potentially extend your company’s digital transformation beyond its walls and into the systems you share with your customers, suppliers, and partners. A notable use case is the Supply chain, where Blockchain is being leveraged to audit product provenance, manage and sign contracts. It can also be applied to any other multi-step transaction procedures like titles and deed management, votation platforms, amongst myriad other uses.
You might always want to tie it all back to your existing model, but you need to think outside of it when your business model will soon grow obsolete. Else, you’ll be bogged down and will not be able to benefit much from the technology's potential. The challenge here is to ensure you're not just slotting the blockchain in a place where it can merely save you some money. Instead, look beyond the bottom line and get it to affect the top line with new revenue, growth, and services. Once you see it as more than a process improvement technology then get aggressive on the innovation path.
As you lead your company into a blockchain future, you need to think of this technology holistically. Some companies plan to use the blockchain to improve or reduce the price of a certain process. Others look to innovate without any existing regulations or legacy systems pulling them down. That’s the mightier promise, as a platform for innovation. Only if you understand it’s business, legal and technical implications well can you apply it to your particular situation. On the business side, it’s an exchange network for transferring value between peers. On the legal and regulatory part, it doesn’t need a middleman to validate the transaction. All this is based off a backend database that has a distributed ledger. This is where we come in.
Today, there may be certain challenges while using the technology to its maximum extent. But within a year or two, we’ll see much more resiliency and maturity in these blockchain platforms. For now, if you're looking to develop a blockchain platform, you'll have to assemble many pieces by hand, just like we did with HTML when you needed to publish a website back in the day. There was a page editor who would hand write the HTML page, line by line almost. Now you can build a web page without touching a line of code with WordPress, Squarespace, Tumblr, etc. That’s where we need to go. But until then we can hand hold you and help bring the blockchain to you, as we work with customers, partners, and the blockchain community to continually advance our readiness.