Blockchain technology has evolved far beyond its origins in cryptocurrency, finding applications across various industries. Here are some expanded applications of blockchain:
Supply Chain Management: Blockchain enables real-time tracking of goods, ensuring transparency and verifying the authenticity of products. This potentially allows the reduction of counterfeit goods by securely recording the origin and movement of items. Smart contracts, in this regard, automate compliance with contractual terms in logistics and procurement, increasing trustworthiness and traceability and opening them for software agencies for higher efficiency.
Healthcare: Provides a secure system for storing and sharing patient data among healthcare providers. Traceability ensures the authenticity of pharmaceuticals by tracking their production and distribution. Additionally, blockchain technology enhances data integrity in trials, preventing tampering and providing accurate results.
Government and Public Sector: Provides secure and transparent digital voting to prevent fraud and increase voter confidence. On the other hand, it offers a safe and decentralised way to manage personal identities, reducing identity theft risks. The same might be applied to electronic document and their processing workflows via traceability and transparency and the document management actions taken.
Media and Entertainment: This ensures fair compensation for creators by tracking and enforcing intellectual property rights for digital content users. It also facilitates the introduction of micropayments for content consumption (e.g., per article or song). Since content creation and alteration are traceable, fake news recognition and author identification have potential value for general society.
Agriculture and environment: Ability to track origin and food processing steps; it tracks the journey of food from farm to consumer, ensuring its quality and safety standards. For farmers or food processing companies, it provides transparency in transactions, securing fair compensation for farmers and fair prices for consumers. Due to the ability to track transactions, waste production and recycling operations might also be tracked, verifying environment-friendly practices in production and distribution. It also might contribute to higher environmental impact tax collection.