• Phone +1 (847) 483 8545
  • info@athenagt.com
26 blockchain use cases athena

Ultimate Cheat Sheet on 26 Blockchain Use Cases

by Team Athena on March 26, 2021 under Blockchain Technology

Now that we have understood what is blockchain and the several analytical aspects of this advanced technology in our previous post, we are back again with a follow-up piece on blockchain use cases. In this post, we have illustrated 26 blockchain use cases which illustrate how blockchain technology services are being put to real use.

In this chapter, by sheer design, we have listed out 26 use cases of blockchain which is always incomplete, as creative geniuses and technical experts across the IT spectrum are constantly working towards leveraging blockchain technology and as we write they are inventing other possible industries where blockchain’s potential can be leveraged upon.

Here, we are highlighting the real-life applications of blockchain and how they are disrupting the various industries as we know it. Starting with the most mainstream example of blockchain use cases i.e. blockchain in banking, we will walk you through other industry spectrums and let you have a sneak peek on how blockchain is disrupting everything from supply chain and finance to shaping the future of data science and the Internet of Things. Do have a read!

26 blockchain use cases and counting

blockchain use cases infographic athena

  1. Banking

One of the biggest advantages of using blockchain technology in banking is that it reduces/eliminates fraud. By implementing blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Solidity Language, Hyperledger, and Composer & Explorer tool to name a few, the banks and financial institutions can provide coherent and secure data exchange at a fraction of the cost. Blockchain-based solutions can help banks and financial institutions enhance their KYC.

blockchain use cases banking

Blockchain service providers are already helping the banks set-up a new trading platform (or move across an existing trading platform) on a blockchain platform. Blockchain engineers enable the financial institutions to transact payments in real-time through seamless execution. Blockchain provides complete transparency, a thorough fraud analysis and above all it is cost-effective.

  1. Travel

blockchain use cases travel infographic

If you have the top 50 to 100 airlines and airports putting data on the blockchain, then you have a master set for the industry that’s consistent and managed by industry governance rules for flight status. That would solve a genuine problem.

The decentralized aspect of the blockchain conforms that any data that’s once fed can never go ‘offline’ or get lost through any accidental deletion or due to any cyber-attack. By making the transactions traceable, blockchain use cases in travel have made it disruptive and safe. Blockchain technology is being leveraged in the travel industry to track luggage, identify services, provide a global ledger to secure bank payments, enable travel companies to accept payments using cryptocurrencies.

  1. Real Estate

blockchain use cases real estate

With real estate joining the bandwagon of early adaptors of blockchain technology, real estate owners have an excellent opportunity of alleviating the challenges they’re facing in their leasing transactions. Blockchain in real estate can help fix the following challenges –

  • Inefficient property search process due to fragmented listings data
  • Difficulty in monitoring the ongoing lease agreements, property operations, and management of cash flows
  • Time-consuming paperwork and by & large offline due-diligence process
  • The absence of real-time information that alters management’s decision-making capabilities

Blockchain use cases in CRE (commercial real estate) include improving the leasing, purchase and sale process includes improving property search process, expediting pre-lease due diligence, simplifying leasing and cash flow management, enabling smarter decision-making, transparent & cheaper property title management.

  1. Public Transportation

blockchain use cases public transport

In May 2018, the Transport Minister of Malta had made an announcement stating to improve the Maltese Public Transport Service through blockchain technology. Realizing its potential, the Minister is aiming to make Malta “the Blockchain Island”.

Governments around the world are beginning to see the potential for blockchain to reduce costs and streamline services. Malta has an extremely progressive government and we’re excited about the potential this partnership brings.

Blockchain use cases also include public transportation, as blockchain technology applications have the answer to the underlying challenges that have been plaguing the transportation industry for decades now.

An average of $140 billion dollar money is struck in disputes for payments in the transportation industry across the globe on daily basis. To make it worse, processing and administration costs have also inflated to 20% of the overall transportation’s costs, blame it on the over-dependence on paper. Blockchain-enabled platforms can enable seamless systemization of documents on a shared distributed ledger, thus largely eliminating the dependency on physical paperwork.

Blockchain in public transportations help record transactions, identify & establish “smart contracts” that is increasingly M2M-connected with technologies such as autonomous driving, wireless EV-charging, electronic toll collection systems etc.

  1. Music Streaming

blockchain use cases music streaming

Streaming services in the recent years have boomeranged record companies’ revenues. However, these companies are facing a major challenge in managing the streaming ecosystem. While major A-listers including Jay-Z, Rihanna, Madonna, and Coldplay etc. have adopted co-op models (With co-streaming, 4 people can broadcast together to create a shared, multi-view experience), other artists are looking out for different payment schemes, such as “micro-subscriptions” of their albums.

Blockchain in music streaming ensures prevention of illegal downloading of music. This technology eliminates the requirement of any middlemen thus making the streaming cost-effective. The first area is the radical disruption plat: We have the vision of helping artists selling their music directly to fans with smart contracts that instantly split and pay the royalties, and with no need for traditional middlemen like labels, publishers, or collecting societies.

  1. Healthcare

blockchain use cases healthcare

Healthcare is a multi-trillion market across the globe. Total health care expenditures in the USA in 2017 were estimated to be approximately $3.55 trillion and it is predicted the expenses would reach more than $5.5 trillion in 2025. It is nearly impossible to manage this huge influx efficiently without injecting blockchain in healthcare.

An excerpt from Blockchain Technology in Global Healthcare, 2017–2025,

“Blockchain technology may not be the panacea for healthcare industry challenges, but it holds the potential to save billions of dollars by optimizing current workflows and disintermediating some high-cost gatekeeper.”

The major verticals sectors where blockchain technology applications can be leveraged to make the healthcare industry disruptive include –

  • Clinical Health Data Exchange and Interoperability
  • Claims Adjudication and Billing Management
  • Drug Supply Chain Integrity and Provenance
  • Pharma Clinical Trials and Population Health Research
  • Cyber Security and Healthcare IoT

Blockchain use cases in healthcare include –

  • To enhance care coordination with secured access to longitudinal health records & patient identity management
  • To ensure patient identity management, secured storage & access to genomics & user-generated area
  • To reduce fraud & admin cost by automating boiling. We prevent drug counterfeiting and improve pharma supply chain finance
  • To improve claimant and beneficiary KYC
  • To reduce drug counterfeiting and theft
  • To boost pharma supply chain finance
  • To enable better visibility for marketing efforts
  • To improve research commons and remunerative models
  • To ensure faster regulatory compliance and approvals
  • To locate unique identifiers for medical devices and assets
  • To ensure smart medical asset management
  1. Marketing

blockchain use cases marketing

With blockchain technology services disrupting every possible industry spectrum, sales and marketing are not left behind from undergoing transformation via blockchain. Investments in blockchain technology companies have outpaced last year – while $800M was funded in 2017; $1.3 billion has been globally invested in 2018. The blockchain is especially being leveraged in the digital marketing space.

Through blockchain applications, digital marketing model can be revived to the user-friendly framework for consumers, advertisers, and marketers and eliminating the need of the middlemen. Blockchain use cases in marketing don’t just cover the advertising aspect, but can be integrated to enhance the e-commerce platforms. For instance, blockchain applications can be used to provide a link between the digital and fashion worlds. Through blockchain, it can be verified if the item is authentic or not.

  1. Legal

blockchain use cases legal

Blockchain in the legal industry and its ramifications will continue to be among the hot topics for the months and years to come among the legal professionals. Smart contracts enable the documentation process more accessible. Blockchain use cases in legal render tracking down of the history of properties, vehicles, and buildings in real estate disputes. It also potentially removes the need for a lawyer’s involvement in the first place. Apart from ensuring data protection, blockchain in legal provides a rich open system that would make it easier to identify people, who are breaking rules and regulations.

  1. Law Enforcement

blockchain use cases law

Blockchain use cases in law enforcement include the transformation of the methods through which law enforcement used to store, share, and secure data that is unparalleled by any other technology. By upgrading from centralized and non-centralized databases to distributed ledger technology, federal agencies can boost efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility of the mammoth-sized data they are handling on daily basis.

  1. IoT

blockchain use cases iot

In spite of the recent development of the connected devices and networking space, there is still a lack of shared architecture that enables to interconnect seamlessly. Distributed Ledger Technology of blockchain can play a major role here. It has the ability to forge trust, not only at the product level but across an ecosystem of cynical constituents.

Blockchain aids IoT in majorly three ways –

  1. Product identity – Blockchain applications in the Internet of Things provide an immutable way to validate the complete data of a product including its origin and components.
  2. Product transactions – Blockchain ensures a secure way to validate and automate the exchange and settlement of a currency-based or tokenized asset.
  3. Product Interactions – Blockchain in IoT provides an immutable way to centralize all interactions including events and updates related to the concerned product.

Blockchain use cases in IoT also offer the following benefits –

  • Reduced transaction time from days to near instantaneous
  • Reduced costs by reducing overheads & cost intermediaries
  • Reduced risk of collusion, tampering, fraud & cybercrime
  • Strengthening trust between parties and devices through shared processes & record keeping
  • Improved discoverability
  1. Insurance

blockchain use cases insuranceBlockchain in insurance ensures improved multi-party contracts. The blockchain technology applications help streamline risk contract efficiency & claims adjudication. They also reduce disputes with the transparency of shared data.

  1. Human Resources

blockchain use cases hrm

In the past decade, the human resource technologies have witnessed their fair share of transformation. While there has been some traction in disruption in the past couple of years; the HR solutions upgraded to subscription-based models on cloud platforms. These days, enterprises are baiting heavily on mobile-first strategies as employees expect consumer-grade digital services.

The next 5 years will, however, bring in challenges as far as ability and agility are concerned. Blockchain in human resources has the potential to re-invent the customer experience by integrating advanced analytics and leveraging the power of social media. Here are the major blockchain use cases in HR –

  • HR blockchain in payroll – An international payroll blockchain solution enables a faster solution than the existing models.
  • HR blockchain in certification – Blockchain technology can easily solve certification issues. It helps in maintaining transparency and detecting fraud in employee credentials
  • HR blockchain reducing HR’s burden – Blockchain in HR will help authenticate documents such as qualifications, position history, job experience, medical certificates, address changes and tax file data through smart contracts.
  1. Automotive

blockchain use cases automotive

Blockchain applications will help to facilitate ride-sharing services & shared autonomous system, monitor, manage and control devices remotely, create new actionable insights from real-time data. They will also assist in on-demand manufacturing, smart prognostics, supply chain traceability & resolving ownership issues.

  1. Wills & Heirloom

Tailor-made smart contracts can be created to determine the authenticity of will and allocation of heirlooms.

  1. Charity

blockchain use cases charity

Blockchain use cases also include charity. Blockchain technology companies can help the NGOs and Govt. track donation allocation, accountability, integrity, reduce overhead and complexity of donation payment processing.

  1. Cloud Storage

blockchain use cases cloud

Decentralized blockchain solutions are created to help the user to save on bandwidth.  Users earlier had to consume a lot of space as files were stored and downloaded from multiple nodes instead of from a single server. Blockchain in cloud storage has now augmented the current file storage systems by injecting an ‘incentive layer’. Blockchain storage tokenization system enables companies to stimulate individual nodes for upholding the network and sharing a portion of storage capabilities.

  1. Commercial Transportation

Here’s another real-life example of blockchain use cases. Blockchain technology can help track journey stops. It can be leveraged along with IoT to create an immutable ledger of trip data.

  1. Credit Score

blockchain use cases credit scoring

Blockchain technology enables the entities to take complete control of their customers’ credit and identity through the blockchain credit scoring solutions. Blockchain offerings in credit score empower them with a cryptographically secured platform where each of their users can have a secure and verified identity. Unlike a traditional credit profile that includes all of the users’ crucial data and can be accessed by any ledger; in blockchain’s case, complete ownership of the profile information of the users is given. Once their personal details including name, address, and employment history have been verified, blockchain helps to erase all copies of the documents they’ve provided from their identity verification systems.

  1. Cybersecurity

blockchain use cases cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is arguably one of the most important use-cases for blockchain. With cyberattack and fraud being the major reason, around 33% of the companies across the globe in 2017 had started integrating blockchain technology. Blockchain solutions can be integrated to enhance data integrity and digital identities apart from rendering safer IoT devices thereby preventing DDoS attacks. Blockchain technology applications are injected to ensure confidentiality, transparency, and availability. They also offer enhanced resilience, encryption, and auditing capabilities.

  1. License Management

blockchain use cases license management

With technology rapidly progressing, the license management has subsequently become too difficult to be managed.  Blockchain solutions are aimed at simplifying the Software Asset Management including issuing, monitoring, tracking, and handling licensing for your software applications. The advanced blockchain platform offers a paradigm shift to the traditional license management methods done by the software vendors so far. Blockchain enables smart autonomous agents with reduced downtime and chances of fraud and zero interference.  Once the data say the license key, is stored in the distributed ledger, it will be then practically impossible to make changes to the ledger without a shared consensus decision.

  1. Education

blockchain use cases education

This is one of the major use cases of blockchain. This technology can be leveraged to issue digital certificates that are immutable and can be saved as public records. These records can be anytime endorsed and validated without the fear of being tampered by involved entities. The records are stored on a distributed ledger, hence certificates can be only evaluated by anyone who has access to the blockchain. Academics can make use of blockchain to carefully preserve the paper-based school certificates, degrees, diplomas, and other course certificates of the students who pass out every year.  To know more about the use cases of blockchain in education, click here.

  1. Energy

blockchain use cases energy

Blockchain technology companies provide direct peer-to-peer trading to support the smooth operation of the power grid. The blockchain engineers help reduce transaction costs through standardization via smart contracts and the automatic execution of orders. Through smart contracts, they help microgrid projects for redistributing excess power from solar panels. Blockchain has now made the microgrids’ accounting virtually tamper-proof, as everyone has their own regularly updated copy of the ledger.

  1. Forecasting

blockchain use cases forecasting

Electronic companies are desperately looking out for ways to enhance demand forecasting, efficiently manage supply in order to streamline inventory levels. Cognitive analytics and blockchain technology can be combined to deliver forecasting solutions and the entire supply & demand loop. Cognitive analytics is capable of extracting the social sentiment from social & collaborative networks. Companies can also leverage cognitive analytics to receive relevant insights from news feeds and crucial information from unstructured data sources, say sales ops. inputs or any other corpus of data coming from emails, SMSes, chat messages etc. A permissioned blockchain can work with cognitive analytics to help demand forecasting maintain one shared record of information around the supply and forecasting.

  1. Voting

blockchain use cases voting

Voting is one of the major aspects of the blockchain use cases. With technology insinuating into every industry scope, voting should not be ideally left behind, the reason being the unprecedented potential blockchain technology carries. Let’s say, if votes are cast in the form of transactions, a blockchain can be created which would keep track of every tally of the voters. In this way, there will be no eyebrows will be raised on the final count as votes can always be counted genuinely without any possibility of tampering. Blockchain audit trail can ensure that no votes were changed or removed, and no illegitimate votes were added.

  1. Supply Chain

blockchain use cases supply chain

Blockchain technology applications add greater visibility to the supply chain industry processes and help the entities boost efficiency across the entire supply chain, thereby helping them yield higher customer value and stronger trading relationships. Blockchain technology services ensure secured and smooth business transactions. They also strengthen trading relationships by integrating the business with robustly secure networks on blockchain both at local and global alike.

  1. Media

blockchain use cases media

Television operators, ad-providers & content creators can leverage blockchain technology solutions so as to establish a secure, validated, and multi-user system for distribution and payments. One of the examples of blockchain use cases in media is Comcast’s blockchain. They use blockchain techniques in the connected home to enable their customers to grant and revoke access to their IoT devices and smart home applications.

Blockchain in media can be used to manage and provide transparency for user privacy and IoT security management and orchestration. Click To Tweet

Those were the top 26 blockchain use cases and we will keep adding to this ultimate cheat sheet, as blockchain services expand injecting other remaining sectors. If you have some few examples to share, feel free to use our comment section below.

And if you want to know more about how blockchain technology can be leveraged, write us here and we will revert soon.

Your thoughts on this post

  1. This blog reflects a lot of research and is perfectly curated. I have joined your RSS feed and look forward to read more of your informative posts.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *