By Kumar Gaurav
Blockchain has been rightly described by many as humanity's biggest invention since the advent of the World Wide Web or the Internet in the ‘90s. India has been one of the torchbearers of the growth of the internet and IT with its young and skilled workforce and the cheaper labour market as compared to the Western countries. Greenshoots of the same trend can be seen today vis-à-vis the growth and adoption of blockchain technology and crypto in India.
High Internet penetration, financial literacy, and particularly easy access to digital platforms in India have contributed to India being one of the fastest-growing crypto markets in the world.
The startup sector, again helped by the strong IT infrastructure in India has also helped in spearheading the growth and adoption of blockchain technology in India, not only in relation to cryptocurrency trading and investments but also with various other use-cases across all kinds of industries in India.
Blockchain Use Cases In Financial Industry
Blockchain is an immutable and irreversible chain of blocks which forms a decentralised ledger of all of the recordable events/transactions that have happened since the start of the chain to date. It is easily accessible, trackable and verifiable by all the stakeholders involved. As such the technology has found most of its initial use cases in the financial and banking sector starting with creating a faster and easily-verifiable payments network.
Blockchain technology can also be used for faster and automatic loan and credit disbursals, automatic and accurate insurance claims processing, faster and more efficient trade financing, capital markets, fund-raising, etc. It can also be used to fasten up the KYC process conducted by banks on all of their customers. The applications and possibilities are endless.
Blockchain Use Cases In Supply Chain Management
Private blockchains like Hyperldger Fabric can find a lot of use cases in Supply chain management. By identifying the production processes and components and then storing the information on Blockchain, a business can monitor their supply chain process from the raw material stage to the end delivery stage.
It facilitates traceability across the entire supply chain. In supply chain management, blockchain provides permanent record-keeping, transparency and validation of transactions shared by multiple supply chain partners. With this, anyone can verify the authenticity or status of the product being delivered. This can be used in the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare, retail industry, and many more.
Blockchain Use Cases In Education & Recruitment
In India, there is still a heavy reliance on degrees and certificates when it comes to determining educational merit and suitability for recruitment into the workforce in the government and private sector. To make matters worse there are a lot of agencies which make fake certificates from real universities and certificates from fake universities.
Blockchain technology can be used to bring all the stakeholders including students, universities, companies and recruitment agencies, etc on one platform which read-only and read and write permissions to the stakeholders where all the certificates can be easily accessed and authenticated and stored for perpetuity. This will also reduce the time and resources spent by corporates in doing lengthy background checks before hiring.
Blockchain Use Cases In Governance
Blockchain also finds its use-cases in improving public governance in various fields like land registration and voting to name just two of many. Land registration in India is a mandatory and yet more time-taking, cumbersome, corrupt and widely litigated process for both buyers and sellers in the real estate space. With multiple agencies operating in silos, the information available from any one agency is easily litigated and very hard to be easily authenticated. Blockchain can bring all of the stakeholders together, and give them the power to verify each land registration at the click of a button.
There are myriad more use-cases of this technology in various other fields far above and beyond the realm of only cryptocurrencies, NFTs, metaverse and gaming in India.
(The author is the co-founder and CEO of Cashaa, which aims at providing a counterpart to the traditional banking system in an advanced manner on the blockchain backbone)
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