Blockchain and its multi-industry tools

Blockchain technology is quickly being adopted by companies. In fact, it is expected to be the next in-thing for businesses in the near future. The blockchain technology market, which stood at $5.92 billion in 2021, is expected to grow at a staggering CAGR of 85.9% from 2022 to 2030, according to a report by Grand View Research. And India is expected to be one of the fastest growing markets in the future.

At a panel discussion on enterprise blockchain at the Web3 Summit 2023, panelists discussed various use cases for the technology. One of the prominent use cases of blockchain has emerged in the banking sector, particularly in trade finance. Hitesh Sachdev, Head-Startup, Engagement, Innovations and Investments, ICICI Bank, comments on the same: “When we started, we felt that trade finance is the most appropriate use case as it is prone to fraud. It has a lot of inefficiencies. So if it solved, it can bring many more benefits to the banks, to the end customers. That’s why we started envisioning building a trade finance ecosystem-buyers, sellers, importers, shipping companies, banks all if they come on one platform. Can we take tackle challenges like discounting bills in just one day? So those were the results we expected. Now we have a consortium of 18 banks and it’s a separate company. The platform is ready for commercial production.”

Sachdev said many more use cases are expected going forward. “CBDC is one of them. It will change the paradigm in which we handle money.”

Busting myths

While Sachdev says it is an exciting journey, it is also filled with many myths. “One of the myths associated with blockchain is that it is a solution that finds its own problem to solve. Many times it was associated with crypto, so it took a lot of time to convince the banks that it has inherent benefits. It needs many more stakeholders to to come together, so we started by convincing banks to come together and form a consortium. And all of us can experiment together, and that’s how we started this journey.”

Rama Iyer, Head, Innovation, GMR group, says: “We believe that there are many natural use cases where blockchain is a simple dovetail. The problem with the industry is that we are trying to force blockchain where it is not needed, but there are definite areas where it is needed. Outside of the airport is cargo where there is cargo movement, baggage movement and so many different parties involved. These are easier for the industry to latch on to and showcase the power of what blockchain has to bring in from a decentralized view. We have full throttle on it. We’ve kick-started it and it’s a work in progress.”

Many projects in production

Key blockchain infrastructure insiders say many projects have gone into production around the world and some amazing work has taken place, says Sankalp Sharma, Co-Founder and VP Engineering, Zeeve, “Like on the infrastructure side, we’re seeing a lot of insight from customers ours about what they do. Even customers don’t realize that they operate on blockchain, but actual businesses operate in such ways. Some of the use cases that we thought were the hardest to implement have gone into production. A few years back, we were missing tools and technologies, but we came up with it. It took us decades to master Web 2.0, so it will take time for Web3 to become cheap and efficient as well.”

OTT platforms are also looking at blockchain

Even OTT platforms like Netflix are not hesitant to adopt blockchain in the future. Tejas Chopras, Netflix, says: “Currently, Netflix is ​​not exploring blockchain, but that doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. There are many ways. First of all, when it comes to expenses, content creation takes up 80% of expenses ours. We spend so much money creating content. I think there’s an opportunity to democratize that part thinking every movie release as an IPO. People participate and buy a token for the movie while it’s being shot. And then when the movie is released people can exchange tokens, they can also get digital memories from the movie.”

Challenges

Experts believe that the strength of the blockchain itself is a bottleneck. “This is because the technology thrives on the ecosystem and it is not natural for the companies to come together with their competitors without losing control. So the management of the consortium, building that trust that you are not there to build an IP and that is for the industry. and to solve problems. It’s the approach that takes some time for people to understand. In addition, companies are increasingly committing to sustainability. However, we need to figure out how blockchain will do that, because to blockchain store every byte of data you multiplies by the number of nodes, so it’s not very sustainable from that perspective.” says Varun Dube, Head Blockchain at lab 45, Wipro.

Integrating AI with blockchain is another crucial factor to look at. Says Ravi Sundararajan, Managing Partner & CEO, VirAstral, “AI is centralized while blockchain is decentralized. How do you combine these two things? The flaw in blockchain or web3 is that on-chain everything is good, but everything can’t be done on-chain. So you must get some information or validation from off-chain. If the information is false, the entire smart contract is not valid.”