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If you’ve been following, you should have a good understanding of what the blockchain is and does to an extent. It’s no doubt a powerful and disruptive technology. Speaking of disruptive, This article is a highlight of how blockchain can change the landscape of business, legal work and technology for good.

Blockchain in the Fintech.

The financial technology (Fintech) sector stands to benefit immensely from what blockchain technology has to offer. Due to the rise and high cost of transactions and exchange of securities within regions and the complexities in the global market, there is a need for higher technological applications that are fast and reduces cost. The traditional approach for asset management isn’t just slow but manual, tasking and error-prone when matching and reconciling accounts by involved parties (Broker, custodian and the clearing & settlement teams).

Blockchain has the potential to remove intermediaries that verify (by an exchange), clear and settle securities transactions (Equities, repurchase agreements, and leverage loans), it will save large sums of fees and capital charges globally by speeding up the securities settlement window. This will be led by an automated streamlined trade cycle giving all involved parties equal access to trade data that’s not just efficiently managed but transparent and has minimal reconciliation settlement with a fast processing time.

Blockchain in Real estate.

The known and expensive burden of the real estate sector can be greatly reduced by the parties involved. Transacting real estate deals is not only burdensome (brokers, government agents, insurance, escrow companies) because of the many middlemen needed to complete a transaction but the process can be expensive. These middlemen hold information the ordinary person does not have access to or lacks the skill to operate in the real estate market. With a public blockchain, these processes will be democratised and automated; making it easy to transact and purchase real estate properties. The financial burden will be reduced substantially and anyone would be able to put up a property on the network for prospective buyers to verify ownership, review and purchase.

Blockchain in a decentralised economy.

The blockchain can enable decision-making among members of an organisation. The idea is a bottom-up structure of an organisation with no central authority or corporate power. Every member calls the shot through a vote (at least 67% majority.). This is a shift from the usual way of creating organisations or entities where the power to make decisions rests on its members or users rather than a selected few acting as the board or a chief executive presiding over. A digital organisation over the blockchain is known as Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

it’s nothing new that companies take decisions without giving much thought to how it affects their customer base or users of their products as long as profit is being made and investors get their returns. The answer, if its customer base or users so chose, is a decentralised digital entity where the power of control over decisions and profit is in the hands of its members.

Blockchain in the legal system.

In the legal world, Lawyers and law firms can adopt blockchain technology in the execution of legal contracts. This will require lawyers to either become developers or specify the intent of a contract clearly enough for a blockchain developer to understand.

Creating a legal smart contract will involve:

• Lawyer with legal knowledge of contract drafting, structure and enforcement.

• Technologist with code designing and engineering skills to implement a contract’s legal construct into a smart self-executing transaction using the blockchain.

Smart contract functions differently from the static traditional contract. Understanding how blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) work is crucial to managing the processes involved. Big firms representing enterprises and small firms handling the dealings of small businesses can take advantage of the opportunity blockchain provides.

Blockchain as decentralised file hosting.

If you’ve followed up until this point, you may recall in this introduction that the blockchain is likened to a central-file sharing system like Dropbox with the exception of central server architecture.
The idea of a distributed file storage system in the blockchain is not far-fetched and is very much being done. Protocols like the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) do just that. It uses content-addressing to uniquely identify and connect all computing devices on the blockchain with the same file system. This will ultimately allow for the storage of files in a decentralised manner. Computing devices on the network with enough unused disk space can rent it out thus slashing the cost of file storage as we have it.

Conclusion

The use cases for blockchain I’d say is “limitless.” The technology is still growing and the more it meets the everyday demand of people; be that in global transactions, legal work, file storage, etc; the more it’ll evolve not just in its system maturity but widespread adoption in major sectors and fields.

With that, I’m happy to say we’ve covered to a good extent the introduction of the blockchain. The next article releases will be an in-depth focus on the application of blockchain in technology, business, law and governance.

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