Despite the popular conviction that blockchain technology is designed to do cryptocurrency transactions and earn bitcoins, blockchain continues its entry into many aspects of life: social media marketing, gaming, healthcare, real-estate, while others. The technology plans to enhance work efficiency, spend less for businesses and improve customer experience.

Blockchain is a a digitalized database and yes it belongs to digital ledger technology (DLT), which means no central data store or administrative functionality. Why is it a bonus for an enterprise? Decentralization together with transparency, gives each participant a way to view all recorded data, ensure its security and track information.

Here are areas blockchain has entered and it has proven that technology will be worth relying on.

Supply chain management, for example, is usually a major yet vulnerable portion of the workflow of countless companies. Parties doing the process often don’t connect to each other directly yet still apply paper-based strategies to information collection and storage. Blockchain offers complete excretion of paperwork: documents flow becomes automated, digital certification must be used as well. More importantly, each authorized an associate the supply chain can track this product from the manufacturer for the consumer and stop counterfeit distribution.

Several American retail giants that encountered foodborne illnesses outbreaks and further food recalls, have implemented blockchain technology inside their food supply chains. Before, tracking one product took around few days minimum, these days a food item’s provenance could be identified for a couple of seconds.

Thus, blockchain solutions made the method of recall faster, better, and cost-saving. Meanwhile, customers also have experienced blockchain adoption of their hypermarkets. In Walmart’s Chinese stores, as an example, they could scan the QR code and acquire all the information about the merchandise: in the farm location towards the inspection certificates.

Healthcare could be the field where blockchain-based solutions have established themselves to be a highly secure and transparent means of keeping electronic health records (EHR). Both doctors and patients receive authorization to reach the records and make use of them at the appropriate time. In the same time, blockchain solutions are powered by smart contracts which enable EHR data privacy protection. Healthcare device data and clinical research are encrypted, insurance might be executed and stored, too. Another use case is prescription medicines and equipment supply chain control.

E-commerce increasingly requires blockchain technology. Again, supply chain can be a crucial aspect here: monitoring goods and managing supplies will often be challenging tasks but blockchain helps businesses manage their inventory well. Consumers who trust their funds and data to e-commerce organizations are involved about data security and transparency but this issue could be addressed with blockchain development. Even slight modifications in transaction are obvious with a blockchain, and tracking who produced mistake is not a problem anymore. It is also possible to execute crypto payments.

The next area is in fact related to cryptocurrency transactions. DeFi, short for decentralized finance, doesn’t only include simple assets transfer, but additionally refers to more difficult financial use cases. The implementation of blockchain leads to intermediary exclusion and, consequently, reduces costs. All transactions are encrypted and immutable, multi-step authentication mechanisms result in the system hard to get into for unauthorized members. Among recent novelties could be the opportunity to choose P2P lending services and digital banking.

Social media has possibility to be affected by blockchain too. Along with its global popularity as well as the ability to connect people around the globe, social media marketing is still at risk of account hacking, identity leakage and copyright infringement. To tackle those issues, blockchain offers author rights protection, digital identity verification and unbiased licensing.