The Potential Benefits of Blockchain to Improve Revenues for Businesses

From education sites to dating sites, and more, blockchain has now made its way into all industries. And, businesses are actively utilizing the benefits of this revolutionary technology to boost revenues and increase profits. Find out how, right here.

Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain – are a few terms that are grossly misinterpreted and have earned undeserved negative press. They are considered as some kind of fad, or bubble that’s about to break. This is isn’t totally undeserved. The general public became wary of digital currencies, especially when the price of a bitcoin skyrocketed and hit the $20,000 mark, at the end of 2017.

This triggered panic, anticipation, conjecture, and uncertainty. However, experts in the field agree that the value of Bitcoin is not the whole focus of the game, instead, the underlying technology – the blockchain is what is going to change the playing field, in a whole new level.

What is the Blockchain?

It’s the core technology on which digital currencies like bitcoin, Munero, Ethereum, and others are built on. Simply put, it’s a massive electronic ledger. It facilitates decentralized payment mechanisms between any two parties. The distributed nature of the ledger makes it easy and cheap to implement and adds a layer of authenticity to the transaction.

Here are the Top Ways in which Blockchain can help Businesses Boost Revenues:

• • Ease of Payments and Money Transfer

As markets become interconnected and businesses go global, you need to be able to send and receive payments from anyone in any corner of the world. With blockchain technology, you can transfer funds securely to anyone in the world, at just a fraction of costs, charged by banks. Since there are no intermediaries involved; transaction costs become dead cheap.

This is highly helpful when you have a distributed team. In fact, a few organizations are already using blockchain technology to handle payroll details of employees located in other countries.

• Smart Contracts

Can you believe that the term, “Smart Contract” was initially coined in the year 1994? Though the term has been around for a few decades, it’s only recently that this term has caught the spotlight thanks to the emergence of the “Ethereum Project” in 2013.

This project has a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts. These are essentially computer applications that run exactly as programmed and start automatically when a particular event occurs. Since they are computer codes, there are no chances for fraud, censorship or downtime.

With Smart Contracts, businesses can bypass complex, time-consuming and expensive legal agreements. Instead, they can draw up a contract that runs on blockchain with other parties. Since smart contracts are executed irrespective of any external influences; they don’t require third-party intervention.

In fact, Synaps a peer-to-peer lending organization is using smart contracts to issue microloans.

• Notary

This is another major application of blockchain technology. It’s used as a cheap and convenient alternative to notary services. In fact, several businesses world over are already using this technology for this purpose. Uproov, a multimedia platform for mobiles, provides users with immediate notarization services as soon as they upload a document, image, video or any other files to the app.

• Distributed Cloud Service

This is another application of blockchain technology that can be used by businesses to gain an advantage over their peers. Storj, a US-based company is offering users with affordable, secure and fast cloud storage using blockchain. By renting out the excess storage space on your hard disks, you can use blockchain technology to provide 300 times the storage space of clouds.

The owner of the firm, Shawn Wilkinson states that this is a win-win situation for all. It generates a revenue stream for the average user, while it reduces the overhead costs of cloud storage for businesses.

• Digital Identity

Did you know that identity fraud causes around $18.5 billion to be lost annually? This makes security a huge concern for businesses of all sizes and across verticals. With blockchain technology, managing and tracking digital identities become a breeze. This results in a reduction of fraud and a seamless method of logging in.

With blockchain, individual identities cannot be forged. The current methods of identification use passwords, pass-codes which is cumbersome and problematic. These passwords are stored in insecure systems, thereby opening further vulnerability attacks.

Blockchain makes use of digital signatures and public key cryptography techniques to verify and authenticate identities. All you need to check is whether the transaction was signed with the correct private key. The identity of the owner is not needed.

This identification technology using blockchain can be applied to several areas like passport authentication, birth certificates, login IDs and much more.

• Supply Chain Management

With a global world, any product you buy doesn’t have a single hand that goes into its making. A single entity doesn't manufacture most of the products available on the market today. Instead, a whole chain of suppliers are involved in the process.

The problem with this approach is that if the product fails, it becomes tough to trace the origin of the defect. With blockchain, you can identify the exact origin of a product and find out who are all involved in the chain and to what extent. In fact, a few businesses like SkuChain and Provenance are already working on this issue.

• Membership Loyalty Programs

This is one of the surprising uses of blockchain for businesses. By building your loyalty program and gift cards, using blockchain you can make it secure and cheaper. What more, by cutting out the middlemen involved, you can ensure that your customers derive the full benefits of the program.

• IoT and Networking

Industry leaders, Samsung and IBM, have partnered together to create a concept known as Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry or ADEPT in short. It uses blockchain technology to make transactions more secure and provide proof-of-work

The idea here is to use blockchain as the backbone for a large network of interconnected devices. This eliminates the need for a central hub, meaning devices can communicate with each other directly. This reduces operational costs and builds a network that is robust.

Wrapping it up

These are just a few examples of using blockchain technology to increase your business revenues. For further help or ideas to get started with this revolutionary technology, click here.