Blockchain beyond fintech - Part I

This article will not only be beyond bitcoin but also will be beyond fintech. But, let’s gets the foundation right.

The early pioneers in blockchain space have been the fintech companies. As you have already guessed, I’m not talking about bitcoin but the underlying technology behind it, Blockchain. We have several uses cases which emerged out in fintech space promising more transparency, security and single source of truth which is distributed across multiple participating entities. We have seen use cases in the space of trade finance, mortgage lending, syndicate loans to name a few. We have seen tremendous value add by going blockchain for these use cases.

Now, I would like to talk about use cases which goes beyond fintech, more for social causes. These use cases disrupt our normal lives and that too for good. I’m talking about identity management, healthcare, global supply chain, real estate tokenisation etc. There are startups which already have started working on this and Hyperledger been the most used blockchain but I would say this is just the beginning. Let’s call it version 1.0. We would reap complete benefit of this when we integrate IOT with blockchain, have AI/ML built into it to address automation etc. But, it’s a good start and we need not look back from here.

Identity management would be the life changer in the coming years. We have had enough of identity theft, fake identities and lot more issues in this space. The real problem is that the data is stored centrally. Be it Facebook, Twitter or equifax, your data is vulnerable. These companies have vested interest in your data. They make money commercialising the data stored in their huge databases. Do we care? Yes we do. We don’t want to run into a situation where you end up knowing that someone else has already taken a mortgage loan but it’s not you. Someone else has used your PII(persona identifiable information) for his benefit. How can we protect our identity? Our data? The solution is self sovereign identity management.

I will discuss more on part II of this series.. I will cover how we can implement it and how it will prove to be beneficial across several other use cases. Till then, any question, please drop a comments and I will be happy to address them.

Happy blockchaining..