10 Enterprise Applications for Blockchain Technology

Just as digital signatures have become increasingly accepted for contracts, blockchain technology is changing the digital treatment of contracts, invoices, ledgers, and other business records.

“Instead of referring to bylaws or traditional legal agreements, smart contracts distributed on the blockchain will allow organizations to refer to the rules of smart contracts to determine things like voting rights, removal of board members, and amendments to their rules of governance,” said Maxwell Hammad, an enterprise software engineer.

In this way, smart contracts encode their governance at the time of creation on the blockchain, where they will not be deleted or overwritten. “Distributed Autonomous Organizations are the trailblazers of this sort of use case for smart contracts, and I think an ambitious view of the future of corporate governance could look to these organizations for inspiration,” Hammad said.

“One of the big opportunities for Web3 lies in creating NFTs that establish trust and professional reputation,” said Bob Gilbreath, co-founder and CEO of Hearty, a company that focuses on this space. “Today, these are locked within company walls, buried on websites, or stuck in closed platforms such as LinkedIn.”

Certifications or awards received at work could be issued as an NFT for verification, for example, adding both legitimacy and portability. Gilbreath sees NFTs as providing legitimacy and portability via their use in a “resume 2.0.”

As enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms continues, the application of those algorithms to the massive amounts of data in public and private blockchains is a no-brainer.

Because data stored in the blockchain is verified and immutable, it can provide a unique set of insights upon analysis. Additionally, the verified nature of the data removes some of the problems of analysis done with junk data.

There is also hope that the process of verifying information in the blockchain can be optimized through machine learning, making the technology less energy dependent.

As digital tokens, NFTs are unique -- a feature that means they have potential in proof-of-ownership use cases like real estate or business licenses.

Records of ownership can be initially issued directly over the blockchain. In addition, when the digital record associated with an NFT is changed -- for example, if it’s sold to a new owner -- that change is documented on the blockchain’s immutable ledger. The result is a clear chain of information for a particular token over time that can be used to establish and verify ownership for a variety of physical business assets.

Tesla allows its employees to receive some of their salaried compensation in the form of cryptocurrency. While the company may be the best-known example of such a policy, it’s not the only one.

As cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum become increasingly mainstream, more employees will request them as an option for compensation. The use of blockchain-enabled decentralized ledgers could speed up the process of paying contractors and vendors, a recent CB Insights report found.

Tokenization -- digitally representing something of value -- also provides a way to compensate employees beyond their salary. For example, employees could be issued an NFT to acknowledge career achievements or that can be redeemed for a job benefit, such as access to training opportunities or special perks.

“Because NFTs carry data stored on the blockchain, that means there is an inherent and uncompromisable transparency,” said Shaun Heng, vice president of growth and operations at CoinMarketCap. The potential is there to use that blockchain feature in sectors like ticketing and merchandising, Heng said.

There are even possibilities in food service, where both food safety and ingredient provenance information are valuable to employees. “NFTs could theoretically be used to provide an immaculate record of all types of food products, throughout the entire supply chain,” Heng said.

The financial services industry has been an early adopter of blockchain technology, thanks to the growing adoption of cryptocurrency and the blockchain’s potential to store and verify information.

The permanent nature of the blockchain is valuable in the financial sector, where transparency and accurate records are paramount. “Companies like Drops, for example, offer instant loans leveraged against NFTs and other DeFi [decentralized finance] assets, removing the need for middlemen and providing NFT asset holders with options for liquidity,” CoinMarketCap’s Heng said.

The global supply chain is still recovering from the havoc resulting from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (with assists from the Suez Canal blockage last year and the recent border blockage between the U.S. and Canada). But the use of blockchain to verify and trace shipments has benefits that will last even once the supply chain is operating smoothly.

Some supply chain applications for blockchain-focused tech are already in use. For example, MediLedge uses distributed ledgers to track the provenance of pharmaceuticals. The UK’s Food Standards agency has piloted similar applications of the tech to track cattle in slaughterhouses.

Startups are also looking into the use of open ledgers to allow consumers to track products and receive updates, like a recall or upgrade, said Charles Edge, an author and CTO of Bootstrappers.mn.

Patents are a classic example of an illiquid asset that can be made liquid via the blockchain. IBM is already working with IPwe in this space, tokenizing patents to allow their owners to commercialize them.

An immutable chain of data can store information about the owner of a patent, the timeline of the patent’s development, the sale of a patent to another party, and more. The opportunities for verification and documentation of intellectual property are widespread, and licensing frameworks for these applications are currently in development.

“The future of real estate is to search on our favorite app, find a home, use a code to walk in and look at it, and then buy it,” Charles Edge said. A couple dozen companies, including SafeWire and PropertyClub, are already working with blockchain in the real estate space, he said. For mortgages, both independent companies or backend tech used by larger lenders can use the blockchain to prove availability and disbursement of funds.

Alternatively, documents and financial assets verified via the blockchain -- for example, proof of deeds to other properties in the form of an NFT -- could play a role in the mortgage approval and property purchasing process. Local regulations will complicate this process, but the value of the real estate market provides financial incentives to overcome those hurdles at the enterprise level.

“The future of real estate is to search on our favorite app, find a home, use a code to walk in and look at it, and then buy it,” Charles Edge said. A couple dozen companies, including SafeWire and PropertyClub, are already working with blockchain in the real estate space, he said. For mortgages, both independent companies or backend tech used by larger lenders can use the blockchain to prove availability and disbursement of funds.

Alternatively, documents and financial assets verified via the blockchain -- for example, proof of deeds to other properties in the form of an NFT -- could play a role in the mortgage approval and property purchasing process. Local regulations will complicate this process, but the value of the real estate market provides financial incentives to overcome those hurdles at the enterprise level.