Gone are the days when blockchain was just known for its currency aspect. Several business owners are now finally paying attention to how effective it is in business operations as distributed ledger technology.
Blockchain is maintained by several various decentralized sources, where all transactions are automatically recorded, secured, and irreversible. If you want to know more about it, here are seven aspects of blockchain technology.
Unalterable Ledger
Blockchains grant immediate and low-to-no-cost verified transactions stored on a distributed ledger. It’s because they’re immutable by design. In other words, they’re inherently resistant to alterations of any stored data. Thus, blockchains as ledgers are considered a “single source of truth.”
Convenient Audit
As stated, blockchains can serve as open, distributed ledgers that offer a permanent record of transactions, guaranteeing a foolproof paper trail for internal and governmental audits. Instead of pulling in records from many disparate sources, it generates a more straightforward, accurate, permanent, and convenient audit.
Better Payment Security
The financial crisis caused by the pandemic has paved the way for several future-proof financing options. For example, if you’re an Ohio resident with bad credit, you can easily access middle town personal loans these days.
Borrowers’ increased need for funds has resulted in loan fraud, which usually exploits small businesses. Since blockchain verifies and records every transaction, it’ll be difficult, if not impossible, to steal any borrowers’ identity, making it more secure than other options.
Quality Assurance
In a blockchain, businesses can link every aspect of the supply chain, including customer demand planning, field inventory management, logistics, and supplier relationship management. So when something goes wrong, blockchain can immediately offer a definitive, contiguous ledger and pinpoint the issue.
Securities And Commodities Trading
Whether in securities or commodities, blockchain promises fast-track trading. With blockchain’s distributed nature, trades are no longer validated for a few days but instead processed automatically within minutes, significantly streamlining stock exchanges.
Smart Contracts
Another automation that blockchain can do is smart contracts, which enable organizations to set logic through code into a blockchain network. As a result, it allows the automatic handling of large amounts of transactions across participants without disclosing sensitive or proprietary information.
These smart contracts provide a single version of a contract or transaction to all involved organizations, preventing one party from modifying contracts.
Supply Chain Transparency
As stated, blockchains can serve as open, distributed ledgers that offer a permanent record of transactions, guaranteeing a foolproof paper trail for internal and governmental audits. Instead of pulling in records from many disparate sources, it generates a more straightforward, accurate, permanent, and convenient audit.
The following are a few blockchain-based platforms with successful ICOs that could potentially assist in increasing cryptocurrency adoption.
Ethereum
Ethereum is the second most valuable in the token market, next to Bitcoin. J.P. Morgan Chase, Intel, and Microsoft are currently using this platform. They’re even members of Ethereum’s non-profit organization Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA), connecting Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, academics, and other blockchain companies with Ethereum subject matter specialists.
Permissionless or public blockchain-based platform, actively ensued in Github, with multiple language applications like Python C++, and proof-of-work-based are the unique selling points of Ethereum. Aside from that, many investors have been showing interest in its “Mature Smart Contracting Cross-Industry Platform.”
NEO
NEO is widely known as “China’s Ethereum.” It’s because it also employs smart contract applications like Ethereum. However, it comes with digitized assets, identification, and decentralized commerce. Its backbones are the Chinese government, Alibaba, and Microsoft. Hence, every investor is well secured.
Another difference is that while Ethereum isn’t quantum computer resistant, NEO is. Aside from that, NEO focuses more on a smart economy than Ethereum does. Regarding digital assets, NEO ensures that the issued digital asset certificates would be regulatory compliant, while Ethereum doesn’t.
Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric is one of the projects of Hyperledger, which aims to utilize a modular architecture and distribute enterprise-grade and code-based ledger frameworks. It currently has approximately 185 collaborating enterprises in different industries, such as banking, finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and technology.
It’s a good blockchain for a business since it’s a permission framework. There are no anonymous participants. Instead, each participant has a known identity validated with the organization’s identity management system called Membership Service Provider (MSP).
Ripple
Ripple, also known as Opencoin until 2015, aims to connect digital asset exchanges, banks, payment providers, and corporations through its blockchain network called RippleNett. It enables global transactions through its cryptocurrency called Ripples or XRP, with almost free international transactions.
XRP is said to be better than other blockchain platforms because it tends to be extensible and faster than other platforms. For instance, the transaction confirmation of Bitcoin takes an average of 10 minutes, while it only takes 5 seconds with XRP transactions.
Final Thoughts
Selecting the best blockchain-based platforms is as easy as 1-2-3 nowadays. Still, there are parameters that you need to consider before choosing the best one. A platform’s popularity, the kind of network, activities, consensus mechanism, languages used, and pricing are the common points to note.
