As Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos puts it, when he first told someone that he was going to open a bookstore on the internet, the counter response was “what’s Internet?”

It was around the time Internet was just starting to take off and not many people knew about it but those who did knew it was going to be something big. Now more than two decades later, we are all again at a similar juncture with a new technology- Blockchain. While some have no idea what it is, others carry misconceptions, and yet others are of the opinion that it will have an even bigger impact than the Internet. Let’s first address the first two categories of people by trying to wrap our head around the technology and then we will try to examine how plausible are proclamations of the latter group.

Most commonly, Blockchain is referred to as a kind of decentralized ledger. It means every time an event takes place, it recorded at multiple points that can’t be modified or erased.

What Blockchain is:

• Distributed
• Secure
• Non-fungible

No, that doesn’t mean Blockchain is some kind of a mother of all technologies. in fact, some of the predictions currently being made may never come to fruition. That is why when we trace the potential impact of Blockchain development on businesses we have to carefully mind the gap between expectations and on-ground applications. By far, Blockchain is not: 

• Scalable
• Feature-rich

Accounting

The first and obvious beneficiary of a transparent and non-fungible ledger is the accounting and overall banking sector as a whole. If all the transactions are stored in a transparent decentralized ledger, auditing would be essentially reduced to a formality. For instance, if a bank can access all the transactions of a company and can be assured of their accuracy, they can save much time and resources that would otherwise go in auditing their books before approving loans.

Retail

This may come as a surprise but retail sector has shown much interest in Blockchain since its early days and might become the industry most transformed by it. To put it simply, retail consists of two distinct operations- procurement and sale of products, and the requisite supply chain as the backbone.

If they deploy Blockchain to tag each product at different stages of a supply chain, not only would it ensure better sync between both operations (improving efficiency) but also bring quality by effectively making everything transparent. In such ecosystem, if you walk into a store to purchase beef, you can check for yourself what breed the cow was, when it was slaughtered, when and where the meat was processed, its shelf-life, and more. If that does come true, Blockchain development definitely will change the face of shopping forever.

Human Resources

Ask any organization and they would tell you that getting the right talent remains the most cumbersome part of their operations. The most they can do is conduct interviews and do background checks- which simply isn’t reliable enough. But if they collectively start using Blockchain, they would create a detailed profile of each employee containing from their academic qualification to recent work performance. This profile then can be used across businesses for simplified and effective talent procurement.

Transparency

Governments around the world too are looking into Blockchain for its ability to solve tough problems. There have been experiments of using it to record property ownership, company registrations, court records, and much more to eliminate chances of fraudulent activities at the very basic level and bring transparency. For businesses, the prospects couldn’t be any better. With such basic infrastructure in place, much of the initial bottleneck would be eliminated, leaving ample space for bold business operations.

As you would have guessed by now, the third group of people might just be right in their prediction. That is also the reason app developers are now exploring the technology with much enthusiasm and finding use-cases for various industries. Now if you have already figured out its use in your business, hire a developer now because the competition is about to get serious.