NEWS

Technology of the year 2018 will be - Blockchain

By VARINDIA - 2017-12-30

New technologies that are poised to redefine our economy. Such as, Blockchain is a technology for a new generation of transactional applications that establishes trust, accountability and transparency while streamlining business processes.

A blockchain has two main concepts. A business network, where members exchange items of value through a ledger, which each member possesses and whose content is always in sync with the others. It is the most disruptive technology of this decade.Blockchain technology market size will be worth 2.3 billion by 2021.

A blockchain is a shared, encrypted ledger that is maintained by a network of computers. It's like a giant spreadsheet shared by many, that shared by multiple people, better known as blockchain, has the potential to eliminate huge amounts of record-keeping, save money.Blockchain is getting implemented across industries and professions. Several technology companies have already moved into this area, including Microsoft with the Azure cloud platform , IBM with IBM Blockchain, its public cloud service, and Amazon's AWS, who has partnered with the Digital Currency Group and another technology services companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra and Capegemini also started giving services into this sector.

IBM is developing enterprise-ready solutions that overcome existing limitations of blockchain technology in terms of privacy, confidentiality, audibility, performance and scalability.

IBM has it’s own Blockchain?

• A private blockchain infrastructure of distributed peers that replicates the device data and validates the transaction through smart contracts

• A permissioned blockchain that makes it possible to define who can join- allowing participants in a business network to see only what they’ve been given rights to see on the blockchain

• A blockchain infrastructure that helps establish trust, accountability and transparency while streamlining business processes and enabling new business models

TCS’ Integrated Blockchain offerings enables financial firms to explore and exploit blockchain potential. TCS builds blockchain proof-of-concept platform and Web applications for banking needs and the Blockchain technology has made significant inroads into the financial sector. TCS demonstrates blockchain at work, unpacks intricacies of the technology.

Infosys harnesses the power of blockchain to help you create a network where data is much more accessible and reliable, and transactions among partners on the network are verifiable and traceable, enabling an ecosystem of trust with your suppliers, partners, and customers.

Wipro’s Blockchain Innovation Lab enables rapid provisioning of blockchain environments to prototype and build use-case specific blockchain industry solutions for clients. By leveraging the blockchain environments in a cloud-based lab, clients are able to fast-track the development of blockchain solutions by leveraging pre-defined use-case blueprints and ready-to-use solutions.

Tech Mahindra uses on very extensively into blockchain-based peer-to-peer electricity trading platform provider have announced a series of technology trials that aim at bringing the benefits of energy microgrid developments to India’s booming urban population, through Microgrid-as-a-Service. MaaS platform integrated with Power Ledger’s blockchain-enabled energy trading capability at the test sites in India.

As per Capegemini, Blockchain opportunities& challenges across multiple industries.It began with Bitcoin, but now it has spread. Blockchain has the potential to radically transform the way industries do business. With Blockchain, healthcare organizations can capture an individual’s lifetime medical history. Privacy concerns can be managed via permissionlessBlockchains, where all parties can view all records, or permissioned Blockchains, where privacy can be maintained following an agreement on which parties can view what transactions and when it’s necessary to mask the identity of the party.

It can also benefit the education sector, educational institutions are turning to Blockchain as a way to avoid fraudulent certifications as well as to ease record-keeping needs for students and alumna. The most important business opportunity for the institutions like, while existing paper-based certification systems may be subject to loss or fraud, the need for a centralized database of credentials and achievements has become critical in the face of an increasingly mobile and digital population.

In Box: Blockchain strategies gain traction and the technology matures and Banks, financial institutions and many others are adopting blockchain technology faster than anticipated. Asper a report of IBM, By 2020, 66 percent of all banks will have blockchain in commercial production.

Blockchain is the technology that allows cryptocurrencies to exist as it tracks transactions relating to digital assets. But it can also track documents which makes it especially attractive to those in the banking, finance and insurance industries.These computers verify transactions-in the case of Bitcoin, the transfer of cryptocurrency between individual users. Each user can access the ledger, and there is no single authority.

The technology behind bitcoin?

Companies are scrambling to find new uses for blockchain technology, which allows participants to record transactions or other information without having to trust a clearinghouse like a central bank. Should investors look for companies developing new uses for blockchain, or will this become the next false "game changer" like the dot-com bubble that burned so many nearly 20 years ago?

Experts have mixed views on both issues – which is understandable because prices would have stabilized if bitcoin and blockchains had predicable futures. For now, all that is certain is that, no matter how sound the technology, these are speculative bets that should be placed only by investors who can afford significant loss.

However, blockchain is still under the nascent stage and not fast enough to handle certain transactions, likeblockchain to guarantee the provenance of diamonds and other merchandise, when it comes to the retail outlets. Another example like, the amount of transactions that currently occur in centralized companies like Visa, Amazon or Flipkart may not be able to be handled by blockchain technology.

This is because centralized systems like the ones used by those companies can process and record far more transactions than the current iteration of the decentralized blockchain network. These inefficiencies are being worked on with some promising solutions in the horizon.

Tags: Technology of the year 2018, Blockchain, IBM, IBM blockchain, tech mahindra, wipro, infosys, capgemini, technology behind bitcoin, game changer, Amazon, flipkart, varindia