Blockchain is not just a platform to trade Bitcoin anymore - it has transcended its beginnings to impact various industries profoundly, and now blockchain developers are taking the distributed ledger to new realities and employing its unique structure and features in groundbreaking innovations.
Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are the most prominent blockchain projects as these concepts revolutionised their respective sector, but they represent just a fraction of the blockchain technology landscape nowadays.
In this article, we are going to talk about the most relevant projects led by blockchain developers in different industries and their impact.
Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are self-executing, tamper-proof contracts with pre-established conditions directly written into code. These contracts automatically enforce the terms of an agreement without the need for an intermediary, which ensures transparency and increases trust among the involved parties.
This new type of contract can already be found in several industries, such as real estate and financial services. In real estate, smart contracts streamline property transactions by transferring ownership automatically when the pre-established conditions (e.g. payment) are met. In the latter, smart contracts are prominent in decentralised finance, where lending, borrowing, and trading digital assets do not involve a traditional intermediary but rather a smart contract.
Notable Blockchain Projects Across Industries
Finance and Banking
Blockchain has transformed the finance and banking sectors by bringing decentralised finance (DeFi) and the tokenisation of assets into the game. DeFi refers to a set of blockchain-based financial services that work like traditional financial systems but in a decentralised manner. Tokenisation allows the digitisation and fractional ownership of assets, which makes them more accessible.
Projects like Aave, a decentralised lending protocol that offers flash loans and variable interest rates, and Polymath, a platform to create and manage security tokens regarding assets in stocks, art, and real estate are examples of how blockchain has brought innovation to the industry.
Healthcare and Records
Blockchain technology offers solutions to a critical issue in healthcare: the security of digital patient data. Using a decentralised platform that is known for being immutable and transparent, medical establishments can collect and store their patients' medical records securely while still keeping them accessible both to healthcare providers and the patients themselves.
MedRec is an example of a medical company that uses blockchain in its favour. MedRec is a blockchain-based platform that securely manages electronic health records. Patients are thus in charge of managing their data and can provide access to medical personnel as needed.
Challenges and Future Potential
Blockchain-based projects must adapt to legislation that varies from country to country, which can severely impact the work of blockchain developers in many ways.
Projects must adhere to local and international regulations, which can change multiple times, making them complex. There are compliance requirements and data privacy regulations that can affect the project if developers do not abide by them, such as the Anti-Money Laundering and GDPT in the European Union.
The lack of clarity in taxation is another challenge developers must face as authorities are still defining how blockchain-based assets can be taxed.
On top of legal issues, blockchain also faces challenges regarding scalability and adoption, which directly impact the future endeavours of blockchain developers. The long processing times and high fees associated with blockchain transactions are repelling potential users. Likewise, the lack of interoperability and significant energy consumption makes it difficult for blockchain to expand even further.
Developers must focus on solving these current issues to be able to evolve and create new blockchain projects capable of revolutionising more industries.
Conclusion
Blockchain developers have gone beyond the key projects we associate with blockchain - cryptocurrency and smart contracts - and discovered how this decentralised platform could benefit other industries, such as healthcare and finance, but also education, real estate, and so on.
And we expect to see blockchain keep growing in today's digital landscape. Despite the challenges it still faces, this expanding technology can provide groundbreaking solutions to many problems and promote the growth and improvement of businesses. Blockchain can reimagine how we make transactions and store critical information.
While we wait for the technological jump of blockchain, why do you not obtain more information about what blockchain is, how it works, and what we can expect from this technology in the future?
