Intro
This year’s trends on crypto and specifically on NFTs have been able to capture the attention of investors and news outlets. In fact, blockchain technology and DLT have changed the nature of doing business, envisioning art, property rights, copyright, data management, tangible digital assets, and much more.
To begin with, let’s take NFTs as an example, which are already able to cover various areas of use, not only in gaming or the arts but also in the agri-food sector (https://wiv.io/), luxury goods (https://icecap.diamonds/), numismatics (https://crypto.post.at/), and real estate sales (https://propy.com/browse/propy-nft/).
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was the first, back in 2017, to purchase a condominium apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, using the emerging Propy protocol (https://propy.com/browse/propy-nft/) to complete the purchase and register the property title on a blockchain for the first time ever.
In May, he listed his Kiev apartment as an NFT backed by real estate through the same Propy real estate platform.
NFTs.
As a sign of how the industry has evolved in the four years since, Propy auctioned off the same property, this time as an NFT backed by real estate, with an initial price of $20,000. Propy advertised the sale as “the world’s first real estate NFT” and sold the NFT for $93,000.
Thanks to technological development, infrastructure, emerging technical advances, and regulatory standards, we are moving towards corporate adoption at any level, which was unthinkable just a few years ago, creating the conditions to begin experimenting with blockchain, DLT, and creating use cases in many sectors, while more and more startups are launching new, bold, and exciting business models.
And what about decentralized finance, better known as DeFi?
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a financial area developed on top of the blockchain that uses digital assets and financial services that seek to disintermediate traditional finance through Smart Contracts and CryptoToken.
DeFi is a general term for decentralized applications (Dapps) that provide financial services on a blockchain, including payments, lending, trading, investing, insurance, and asset management. Through DeFi, services that typically operate without centralized intermediaries or institutions and use open protocols that can be programmatically combined through Smart Contracts in flexible ways are possible.
Most DeFi applications are built on the Ethereum blockchain, and thanks to the public and transparent blockchain, anyone on the network can independently and decentralizedly verify the issuance of Ether (ETH) and/or tokens.
Anyone with the skills can program applications, create, store, manage digital resources and, through Smart Contracts and dapps, build irreversible and complex agreements without the need for anyone to control or act as a guarantor.
Thanks to DeFi, a new financial paradigm has been created, completely independent and transparent, in which anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone can access the network and interact, disintermediating themselves (and their money) in a simple and transparent way.
The market has experienced explosive growth since 2020. According to the DeFi Pulse monitoring service, the value of digital assets locked in DeFi services grew from less than $1 billion in 2019 to over $15 billion at the end of 2020, and over $90 billion in 2021, yet DeFi is still in its early stages of maturity.
E-commerce.
Blockchain and e-commerce are often associated with stereotypes: instant payments, fraud resistance, zero fees, and more.
E-commerce is a business worth tens of trillions of dollars https://www.ninjamarketing.it/2021/05/04/ecommerce-267-trilioni-di-dollari-italia-ottava/, growing 4% each year, and if stores were to start operating on blockchain today, they could immediately access a trillion-dollar market in rapid expansion.
Currently, accepting online payments requires expensive IT infrastructure that supports, guarantees, and protects the entire “chain,” but contrary to what one might suppose, a payment system built on blockchain does not require complicated procedures to get started. It is sufficient to register for the service by completing the anti-money laundering data, downloading and/or customizing the wallet.
At any level, it is possible to receive cryptocurrency payments immediately, at competitive fees, for global transactions, fully traced, secure and irreversible, and thanks to services made available by crypto gateways, convert the received cryptocurrencies into euros in real-time with immediate availability in one’s current account.
Supply Chain.
While supply chains are linear and often paper-based, processing documentation as a product, production chains are increasingly digital and dynamic, and in this sense, blockchain seems like an excellent solution to help solve the verifiability of a digital trace, recording the path of goods and sharing the supply chain with all participants.
Controlling product quality throughout its entire supply chain is one of the world’s greatest challenges today, especially when it comes to typical food products. In recent years, several companies have been experimenting with the joint use of blockchain and Radio Frequency Identification technologies to solve problems in scenarios involving numerous untrusted actors.
Thanks to technological development and integration with external tracking methods, blockchain can integrate all stages of a supply chain into the same smart contract system.
In this sense, blockchain is gaining more and more popularity as a technology to enable certified and immutable product traceability, preventing fraud and counterfeiting, ensuring reliable, transparent, and shared information throughout the supply chain.
By combining smart contracts, IPFS, and Internet of Things technologies, all stakeholders can access, verify origin, authenticate articles, and demonstrate compliance.
Through smart contracts, it is possible to create indivisible tokens and link them to intrinsically indivisible objects for any type of product, such as books, shoes, and much more. In this way, it is possible to associate each single record, written on the blockchain, to the asset and its history.
We are only at the beginning, but without a doubt, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger (DLT) technology is changing many aspects of business and building the foundations of a new chain of trust.
Reference:
https://wiv.io/ Blockchain in the agricultural sector
https://icecap.diamonds/ Blockchain in the luxury goods industry
https://crypto.post.at/ Blockchain in numismatics
https://propy.com/browse/propy-nft/ Selling a house with Blockchain
https://defipulse.com/ Decentralized Finance
https://www.optelgroup.com/ Supply Chain Management
https://www.minespider.com/ Supply Chain Management in minerals
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