- Efficient Payments and Automating Transaction Processing
Inventory tracking is an established use case, particularly in trade transactions where enterprise blockchains also provide a convenient platform to pool and exchange documentation.
Smart contracts, which contain in-built fulfilment conditions for counterparties and eliminate many legal go-betweens, have in several instances automated trade transactions.
In May 2018 for example HSBC provided a letter of credit for the first paperless trade finance transaction, a soybean shipment for US food and agricultural group Cargill, using the private permissioned Corda blockchain platform developed by tech consortium R3. Dutch bank NG was counterparty to the deal. Another trade finance venture is Israel-based Wave, which is developing bill-of-lading products using blockchain.
A lot of financial houses felt pressured to develop in-house blockchain products to streamline existing data flows and improve efficiency of disparate processes, according to David Shrier.
“For financial companies, tomorrow’s emergency is blockchain contenders can deliver payments for 1/10 of the cost,” says Shrier. “If I am CTO of a Global 500 company, I want a SWAT team working on blockchain to develop prototypes and use cases in select areas of my business. With large companies, to enable global deployments they need years “[JK1]
2. Enterprise Resource Management
Blockchain also has an important application in proof of provenance and product origin for consumers, e.g. UK’s Monochain, and LVMH’s private ERM blockchain to prevent counterfeit goods for key brands Louis Vuitton a d Dior; based on JPM’s Ethereum based
development forum Quorum. And among emerging markets, a 2019 funding competition, the LatAm Tech Fair in London, was awarded to a blockchain solution for waste management.
- waste management e.g. Plataforma Verde, member of the World Alliance for Efficient Solutions; linking government and corporations, to track wastage through the supply
chain and preventing loss through theft and corruption
“For financial companies, tomorrow’s emergency is blockchain contenders can deliver payments for 1/10 of the cost,” says Shrier. “If I am CTO of a Global 500 company, I want a SWAT team working on blockchain to develop prototypes and use cases in select areas of my business. With large companies, to enable global deployments they need years “[JK1]
3. Creating fungible tokens representing investments in IP, ‘the token economy’ e.g. Pepo which enables content creators to turn social capital into crypto capital…
tokens are exchanged through for Amazon and Apple; content creators tipped with tokens as opposed to likes.
Pepo CEO Jason Goldberg explained the technical innovations which have enabled micro-payments to be made on the blockchain network in real time, without needing to pay for ‘gas’ and digitally sign each micro-transaction.
“User experience is further strengthened through meta-transactions… Multi-signature, or “multisig,” contracts have led to innovations such as session keys, which remove the need for users to sign every transaction. These (together with pin code enabled smart wallets) two breakthroughs combine to make the experience of using an Ethereum-based app far smoother.
https://www.coindesk.com/thanks-to-better-ux-this-year-dapps-will-go-mainstream
3. Efficiency gains through auctioning of transaction processing on the blockchain; transition form POW to POS consensus protocols means having higher stake in that cryptocurrency
means higher chance of reward for processing vs higher computing power.
4. Greater scope for business partnerships as transaction data is immutable and universally accessible; security through decentralisation; and customer PII is secure from layers of permissioned access and
also cryptographically encoded on the ERM blockchain (public/private/public-private)
This will have applications for customer loyalty schemes, for example, which can be transferable between multiple business partners. Anthony Welfare discussed the potential benefits here in ‘Commercializing Blockchain: Strategic Applications in the Real World’.
