In addition to cryptocurrency: what else is the blockchain used for?
According to Research and Markets, the size of the global blockchain market will grow to $ 6 billion by 2023, with an average annual growth rate of 48%. Over the past two years, we have seen an increase in investment in companies developing blockchain applications for the financial sector.
For example , chain company from San Francisco, which creates blockchain solutions for financial institutions, attracted almost 44 million investments from various organizations, including Nasdaq and Visa. Another example - Coinbase, which offers wallets for cryptocurrencies, received $ 217 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the New York Stock Exchange, and others.
However, there are other areas in which the blockchain technology is used, for example, medicine, as well as notarial and public services. On how blockchain changes the appearance of these areas and what projects are developing today, we will describe further.
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/ image DennisM2 PD
Earlier this year, the IBM Institute for Business Value research agency conducted a survey in 16 countries among 200 leaders of health organizations. About 72% of them indicated that they plan to implement solutions based on blockchain technologies by 2020. Moreover, 16% already use blockchain solutions in their work.
The blockchain will eliminate the cases of counterfeit medicines and optimizes the process of their transportation, since at each stage of delivery the origin of the drug is easy to verify. Distributed registries will also formalize and secure the process of exchanging medical records, help protect important information from hackers, and give patients more control over their health records.
For example, there are now 26 different electronic medical record management systems in Boston, each of which presents and transmits data in its own way. Important information (for example, information about allergic reactions to drugs in a patient) is often “scattered” between several bases and sometimes unavailable at critical times.
According to John Halamka, technical director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the blockchain will help solve these problems. Therefore, Halamka together with scientists from MIT Media Lab have developed a platform MedRec , based on Ethereum. The system uses smart contracts to support all operations.
For example, a Patient-Provider Relationship Contract (PPR) is concluded between two nodes of the system when one of them manages the medical records of the second (in particular, when the list of prescribed drugs for a patient changes). A Summary Contract (SC) allows patients to view the history of medical records.
One of the main difficulties faced by developers of blockchain solutions outside of cryptocurrency is ensuring the security of the blockchain. For example, in the case of Bitcoin, miners use their computing systems and consume electricity to perform the calculations necessary to verify the data in the blockchain. In return, they receive rewards in the form of digital money.
Non-cryptocurrency projects cannot provide members of the network with a similar form of remuneration. Therefore, it is difficult for them to interest the audience. However, the creators of the MedRec project solved the problem: medical organizations and research agencies will deal with the protection of information in the blockchain.
They will act as miners and use their equipment and computing infrastructure to preserve the integrity of the blockchain. In exchange, MedRec will provide them with access to anonymous patient data (with the latter’s consent) for conducting epidemiological and other studies.
For example, such a project has already been implemented in Estonia. Since 2008, all hospitals and doctors in the country have to digitize health information for the population. Recently, the blockchain is responsible for its security.
The distributed registry acts as a database for medical records. When changes are made to the patient's medical record, this event is immediately recorded in the network, along with information about what was changed, deleted, added. This level of transparency allows therapists, surgeons, pharmacists, and other specialists to obtain relevant and correct information about the patient, with whom the community “agrees”.
The system makes it possible to make more accurate diagnoses taking into account a fully documented medical history, guide the actions of doctors in crisis situations (for example, provide information about allergic reactions to medications), and even correct treatment for chronic diseases over time (depending on changes in the patient’s condition).
In addition to the medical information on the blockchain, insurance companies or police departments responsible for issuing driver's licenses may apply. In 2015, Estonian road authorities received access to 80 thousand medical records of residents of the country who came to exchange driver's licenses in order to confirm their state of health.
Blockchain is a distributed digital database (or registry), records in which are protected by cryptographic algorithms. Therefore, it is often considered as a solution for registering property rights.
For example, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, together with a startup ChromaWay, are working on a blockchain project to register land ownership rights. The Russian government also announced the start of testing such a system. According to the press service of the Ministry of Economic Development, the experiment will be held from January to July 2018.
As the Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin notes, the Rosreestr system is expensive and works slowly and inefficiently, which translates into high costs for the population and companies.
All participants in the transaction - sellers, buyers, banks, realtors - are forced to enter into contracts with each other in order to protect themselves from possible financial losses. All this takes time and money. The blockchain will optimize costs by eliminating intermediaries in some cases and will ensure that agreements are automatically executed using smart contracts.
In addition, in 2016, Bitfury, together with the National Agency of the Public Registry of Georgia, launched a project to create blockchain platforms for registering land plots. Before the advent of the system, in order to buy or sell land, the residents of the country had to personally contact the National Agency, submit documents and pay from 50 to 200 dollars. Blockchain technology has reduced the cost of "commission" to 10 cents.
Already from the end of February of this year, information on the property statement is automatically sent to the blockchain. And on the official page of the agency appeared the function of checking the validity of information in a distributed registry.
The property rights registration platform is implemented on the basis of our open framework for creating Exonum blockchains. We have deployed a distributed service of forming time stamps "on top of" the existing registry of property rights to real estate. At the moment, only the hashes of certificates from the registry are included in the blockchain, however at the next stage we plan to place all the data on the sale and purchase transaction in the registry. Technological demo system you can find here .
In the future, we expect to continue work on the introduction of blockchain technologies in Georgia - notaries and government procurement are among the priority areas.
At the same time, blockchain technologies can also be used to register rights to other property: houses, cars, even ideas and copyrighted works. For example, the ASCAP and SACEM societies create a blockchain system for protecting musical copyright.
One of their tasks organizations put the unification of two key standards for the identification of music: ISRC and ISWC . Blockchain will speed up the process of registering songs and songs and allow you to monitor their playback. Musicians will have the opportunity to upload their work and their metadata to the blockchain, and when listening to the composition, a smart contract will be concluded between him and the listener, describing the conditions of use - for personal listening, commercial use on the radio or in the film, and so on.
A similar initiative is being promoted by the dotBlockChain blockchain project together with SOCAN, MediaNet, Songtrust, CD Baby and FUGA.
Above blockchain technologies to protect copyright work in Russia. At the conference "Cryptocurrency and other products of the blockchain technology as objects of intellectual property," participants presented several blockchain solutions for capturing digital information: the TSU project rupto.io, the Lifechain video platform and the FactFix system. Resources write any digital information in the blockchain - images, videos, creative ideas, FactFix even allows you to leave feedback about any restaurant.
Records will be recorded in an open blockchain, and project participants will be able to witness in court in the event of a dispute over copyright and confirm that such a file (or musical composition, or picture, etc.) was actually created at a specified time, and the rights to it belong platform member.
/ image by Greg Dunlap CC
In the world, about 192 countries are trying to introduce blockchain technology into state structures. Among them are Sweden, Georgia, Brazil and Estonia.
For the past few years, the Estonian government has been developing a platform for identifying people who are not citizens of the country - e-Residency . The project participants became so-called electronic residents and were able to verify documents and use electronic banking services and other services that are available to Estonians.
Now, e-Residency developers are introducing the blockchain into the project infrastructure to increase its security. The team of engineer Kaspar Korjus (Kaspar Korjus), who took the first place in the Forbes Estonia rating in the category “Technology and Finance” (among businessmen under 30), is working on it.
Russian government agencies are also planning to introduce blockchain technology. At the beginning of the year, Rosreestr, the Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending and Vnesheconombank launched a joint project, under which they registered the first equity participation agreement using a distributed registry. The system was developed using our Exonum platform.
In the future, the blockchain can be used when interacting with Rosreestr with the Fund for the Protection of the Rights of Participants in Share Construction, where developers transfer insurance premiums in the amount of 1.2% of the amount of contracts. If necessary, this money will be used to pay compensation to participants in shared construction. The idea is that Rosreestr will not be able to register the contract until it receives confirmation from the Fund that the developer has paid the insurance premium.
Testing of the project is carried out in the Leningrad region, but later it is planned to start applying the technology in other regions.
Distributed registries can transform almost every aspect of government activity. For example, become the basis for voting systems.
At the beginning of this year, the American stock exchange Nasdaq successfully applied the e-Voting system to vote for the company's shareholders. Elections using blockchain technologies are similar to a cryptocurrency transaction, but with the use of special “colored” coins, which voters transfer to the account of their chosen candidate. To determine the winner, it is enough to check the accounts after the end of the elections. Since the public blockchain is transparent, any user can track the fate of his vote.
Also systems for electronic voting allows you to create our platform Exonum. The technological demo of the electronic voting system created using Exonum can be found here .
We noted only a few areas in which the blockchain helps improve user experience and reduce costs. In addition to these, we can highlight the energy sector, the Internet of things, as well as operations with goods and raw materials (for example, tracking the origin of diamonds).
Blockchain is able to optimize business processes in areas where it is often necessary to work with intermediaries whose services are paid, have to process data that requires a high level of trust, or interact with a large number of independent participants (or clients). In these three cases, the blockchain is able to benefit in almost any area of ​​the economy.
Our other materials on the topic:
For example , chain company from San Francisco, which creates blockchain solutions for financial institutions, attracted almost 44 million investments from various organizations, including Nasdaq and Visa. Another example - Coinbase, which offers wallets for cryptocurrencies, received $ 217 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the New York Stock Exchange, and others.
However, there are other areas in which the blockchain technology is used, for example, medicine, as well as notarial and public services. On how blockchain changes the appearance of these areas and what projects are developing today, we will describe further.
')
/ image DennisM2 PD
The medicine
Earlier this year, the IBM Institute for Business Value research agency conducted a survey in 16 countries among 200 leaders of health organizations. About 72% of them indicated that they plan to implement solutions based on blockchain technologies by 2020. Moreover, 16% already use blockchain solutions in their work.
The blockchain will eliminate the cases of counterfeit medicines and optimizes the process of their transportation, since at each stage of delivery the origin of the drug is easy to verify. Distributed registries will also formalize and secure the process of exchanging medical records, help protect important information from hackers, and give patients more control over their health records.
For example, there are now 26 different electronic medical record management systems in Boston, each of which presents and transmits data in its own way. Important information (for example, information about allergic reactions to drugs in a patient) is often “scattered” between several bases and sometimes unavailable at critical times.
According to John Halamka, technical director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the blockchain will help solve these problems. Therefore, Halamka together with scientists from MIT Media Lab have developed a platform MedRec , based on Ethereum. The system uses smart contracts to support all operations.
For example, a Patient-Provider Relationship Contract (PPR) is concluded between two nodes of the system when one of them manages the medical records of the second (in particular, when the list of prescribed drugs for a patient changes). A Summary Contract (SC) allows patients to view the history of medical records.
One of the main difficulties faced by developers of blockchain solutions outside of cryptocurrency is ensuring the security of the blockchain. For example, in the case of Bitcoin, miners use their computing systems and consume electricity to perform the calculations necessary to verify the data in the blockchain. In return, they receive rewards in the form of digital money.
Non-cryptocurrency projects cannot provide members of the network with a similar form of remuneration. Therefore, it is difficult for them to interest the audience. However, the creators of the MedRec project solved the problem: medical organizations and research agencies will deal with the protection of information in the blockchain.
They will act as miners and use their equipment and computing infrastructure to preserve the integrity of the blockchain. In exchange, MedRec will provide them with access to anonymous patient data (with the latter’s consent) for conducting epidemiological and other studies.
For example, such a project has already been implemented in Estonia. Since 2008, all hospitals and doctors in the country have to digitize health information for the population. Recently, the blockchain is responsible for its security.
The distributed registry acts as a database for medical records. When changes are made to the patient's medical record, this event is immediately recorded in the network, along with information about what was changed, deleted, added. This level of transparency allows therapists, surgeons, pharmacists, and other specialists to obtain relevant and correct information about the patient, with whom the community “agrees”.
The system makes it possible to make more accurate diagnoses taking into account a fully documented medical history, guide the actions of doctors in crisis situations (for example, provide information about allergic reactions to medications), and even correct treatment for chronic diseases over time (depending on changes in the patient’s condition).
In addition to the medical information on the blockchain, insurance companies or police departments responsible for issuing driver's licenses may apply. In 2015, Estonian road authorities received access to 80 thousand medical records of residents of the country who came to exchange driver's licenses in order to confirm their state of health.
Registration of property rights
Blockchain is a distributed digital database (or registry), records in which are protected by cryptographic algorithms. Therefore, it is often considered as a solution for registering property rights.
For example, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, together with a startup ChromaWay, are working on a blockchain project to register land ownership rights. The Russian government also announced the start of testing such a system. According to the press service of the Ministry of Economic Development, the experiment will be held from January to July 2018.
As the Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin notes, the Rosreestr system is expensive and works slowly and inefficiently, which translates into high costs for the population and companies.
All participants in the transaction - sellers, buyers, banks, realtors - are forced to enter into contracts with each other in order to protect themselves from possible financial losses. All this takes time and money. The blockchain will optimize costs by eliminating intermediaries in some cases and will ensure that agreements are automatically executed using smart contracts.
In addition, in 2016, Bitfury, together with the National Agency of the Public Registry of Georgia, launched a project to create blockchain platforms for registering land plots. Before the advent of the system, in order to buy or sell land, the residents of the country had to personally contact the National Agency, submit documents and pay from 50 to 200 dollars. Blockchain technology has reduced the cost of "commission" to 10 cents.
Already from the end of February of this year, information on the property statement is automatically sent to the blockchain. And on the official page of the agency appeared the function of checking the validity of information in a distributed registry.
The property rights registration platform is implemented on the basis of our open framework for creating Exonum blockchains. We have deployed a distributed service of forming time stamps "on top of" the existing registry of property rights to real estate. At the moment, only the hashes of certificates from the registry are included in the blockchain, however at the next stage we plan to place all the data on the sale and purchase transaction in the registry. Technological demo system you can find here .
In the future, we expect to continue work on the introduction of blockchain technologies in Georgia - notaries and government procurement are among the priority areas.
At the same time, blockchain technologies can also be used to register rights to other property: houses, cars, even ideas and copyrighted works. For example, the ASCAP and SACEM societies create a blockchain system for protecting musical copyright.
One of their tasks organizations put the unification of two key standards for the identification of music: ISRC and ISWC . Blockchain will speed up the process of registering songs and songs and allow you to monitor their playback. Musicians will have the opportunity to upload their work and their metadata to the blockchain, and when listening to the composition, a smart contract will be concluded between him and the listener, describing the conditions of use - for personal listening, commercial use on the radio or in the film, and so on.
A similar initiative is being promoted by the dotBlockChain blockchain project together with SOCAN, MediaNet, Songtrust, CD Baby and FUGA.
Above blockchain technologies to protect copyright work in Russia. At the conference "Cryptocurrency and other products of the blockchain technology as objects of intellectual property," participants presented several blockchain solutions for capturing digital information: the TSU project rupto.io, the Lifechain video platform and the FactFix system. Resources write any digital information in the blockchain - images, videos, creative ideas, FactFix even allows you to leave feedback about any restaurant.
Records will be recorded in an open blockchain, and project participants will be able to witness in court in the event of a dispute over copyright and confirm that such a file (or musical composition, or picture, etc.) was actually created at a specified time, and the rights to it belong platform member.
/ image by Greg Dunlap CC
Organization of "electronic governments"
In the world, about 192 countries are trying to introduce blockchain technology into state structures. Among them are Sweden, Georgia, Brazil and Estonia.
For the past few years, the Estonian government has been developing a platform for identifying people who are not citizens of the country - e-Residency . The project participants became so-called electronic residents and were able to verify documents and use electronic banking services and other services that are available to Estonians.
Now, e-Residency developers are introducing the blockchain into the project infrastructure to increase its security. The team of engineer Kaspar Korjus (Kaspar Korjus), who took the first place in the Forbes Estonia rating in the category “Technology and Finance” (among businessmen under 30), is working on it.
Russian government agencies are also planning to introduce blockchain technology. At the beginning of the year, Rosreestr, the Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending and Vnesheconombank launched a joint project, under which they registered the first equity participation agreement using a distributed registry. The system was developed using our Exonum platform.
In the future, the blockchain can be used when interacting with Rosreestr with the Fund for the Protection of the Rights of Participants in Share Construction, where developers transfer insurance premiums in the amount of 1.2% of the amount of contracts. If necessary, this money will be used to pay compensation to participants in shared construction. The idea is that Rosreestr will not be able to register the contract until it receives confirmation from the Fund that the developer has paid the insurance premium.
Testing of the project is carried out in the Leningrad region, but later it is planned to start applying the technology in other regions.
Distributed registries can transform almost every aspect of government activity. For example, become the basis for voting systems.
At the beginning of this year, the American stock exchange Nasdaq successfully applied the e-Voting system to vote for the company's shareholders. Elections using blockchain technologies are similar to a cryptocurrency transaction, but with the use of special “colored” coins, which voters transfer to the account of their chosen candidate. To determine the winner, it is enough to check the accounts after the end of the elections. Since the public blockchain is transparent, any user can track the fate of his vote.
Also systems for electronic voting allows you to create our platform Exonum. The technological demo of the electronic voting system created using Exonum can be found here .
We noted only a few areas in which the blockchain helps improve user experience and reduce costs. In addition to these, we can highlight the energy sector, the Internet of things, as well as operations with goods and raw materials (for example, tracking the origin of diamonds).
Blockchain is able to optimize business processes in areas where it is often necessary to work with intermediaries whose services are paid, have to process data that requires a high level of trust, or interact with a large number of independent participants (or clients). In these three cases, the blockchain is able to benefit in almost any area of ​​the economy.
Our other materials on the topic:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/353350/
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