Blockchain Technology: Initiatives and Use Cases in the Industry

Introduction

The Blockchain technology is probably the most important innovation since the emergence of the Internet. It holds the same promise as the printing press or the Internet, to allow new forms of secure and anonymous communication to take place in many diverse sectors of the society and a multitude of industries. Areas that Blockchain is set to disrupt, include healthcare, transportation, supply chain, risk management, manufacturing, tourism, banking, education, and government, to name but a few. The Blockchain technology is still developing and yet it is already driving the digital revolution with the digitization of processes, automation, tokenization of physical resources, and codification of intricate contracts between stakeholders. Countries which have openly embraced this technology include China, USA, UK, UAE, Japan, Singapore and Australia. According to Market Watch (2020), Blockchain market share is expected to exceed USD 25 billion by the year 2025.

The idea of Blockchain technology, originally termed as block chain, was initially announced in a Bitcoin white paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The first implementation appeared in 2009 (Zaky, 2020). This was essentially the realisation that the technology that underlined the operation of ‘bitcoin’ (the cryptocurrency that can now be considered as the application of Blockchain) could be separated from the currency and used for all kinds of other inter-organisational cooperation. There was, then, further development over the period of about 10 years in terms of smart contracts, proofs of work, and Blockchain scaling. A brief timeline of the development of Blockchain technology is presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Timeline for evolution of Blockchain technology

Characteristics of Blockchain technology include decentralisation, immutability, transparency, security, consensus, and smart contracts (Rosic, 2016; Tasca and Tessone, 2019). Witscad (2020) divides the characteristics into functional characteristics and emergent characteristics, as shown in Figure 2. These are explained in later sections of this chapter. Because of the attraction of these features, Blockchain has been gaining attention in areas beyond its cryptocurrency roots since about 2014. This technology has now gone beyond its initial application in cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin). It is now being applied to nearly every sector of the society including banking, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, logistics, supply chain management, and risk management, to name but a few, as already mentioned.

The organisation of this chapter is as follows. The next main section defines the Blockchain technology, describes the essential terminology, outlines the main characteristics and benefits, describes the underlying concepts and varieties of Blockchain, and summarises the generic Blockchain process. Various well known Blockchain platforms are also summarised, for the sake of completeness. The next main section lists various use cases taken from different industries, vendors and service providers; and various initiatives that are currently in existence. The final section presents the conclusion.

It is hoped that this chapter sets the scene for further discussion on various Blockchain related investigations, that appears in other chapters in this book.

Blockchain Technology

A Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger (database), spread across many computers with no central control or authority, in which digital assets (transactions representing values, identities, agreements, property rights, credentials, etc) are recorded and linked together so that they provide the entire history and the current state or the provenance of the assets. It promises a more efficient, secure and transparent way of handling transactions of digital assets, that can save a huge amount of administration, bureaucracy, effort and time. The Blockchain technology is based on a complex branch of mathematics called cryptography.