Blockchain and Its Multi-Industry Utilities The global market for blockchain technology, which stood at $5.92 billion in 2021, is expected to grow at a CAGR of a staggering 85.9% from 2022 to 2030 as per a report by Grand View Research.

Blockchain technology is seeing fast adoption among businesses. In fact, it is expected to be the next in-thing for businesses in the near future. The global market for blockchain technology, which stood at $5.92 billion in 2021, is expected to grow at a CAGR of a staggering 85.9% from 2022 to 2030 as per a report by Grand View Research. And India is expected to be one of the fastest-growing markets in the future.

At a panel discussion on blockchain for enterprises at Web3 summit 2023, panellists discussed various use cases of technology. One of the prominent use cases of blockchain has emerged in the banking sector, especially in the area of trade finance. Commenting on the same, Hitesh Sachdev, Head-Startup, Engagement, Innovations and Investments, ICICI Bank, says, "When we started, we felt trade finance is the most apt use case as it is prone to fraud. It carries a lot of inefficiencies. So if it is solved it can bring many more advantages to banks, to end customers. Therefore, we started envisaging-building an ecosystem for trade finance-buyers, sellers, importers, shipping lines, banks all of them if they come on a single platform. We thought if we can address challenges like bill discounting in just a day. So those were the outcomes we expected. Now we have a consortium of 18 banks and it is a separate company. The platform is up for commercial production."

Sachdev said that going forward many more use cases are expected. "CBDC is one of them. It will change the paradigm in which we handle money."

Busting myths

While Sachdev tells that It's an exciting journey, it is filled with lots of myths too. "One of the myths associated with blockchain is that it is a solution that is finding its own problem to solve. Many times it was associated with crypto so it took a lot of time to convince banks that it has inherent advantages. It needs many more stakeholders to come together so we started with convincing banks to come together and form a consortium. And all of us can experiment together and that's how we started this journey. "

Rama Iyer, Head, Innovation, GMR group, says, "We believe that there are many natural use cases where blockchain is an easy dovetail. The problem with the industry is we are trying to force fit a blockchain where it is not needed, but there are definite areas where it is needed. Beyond airport, cargo is an area where there is freight movement, baggage movement and so many different parties involved and power of what blockchain can be explored. We are full throttle on it. We have kickstarted it and it's a work in progress."

Many projects in production

Key people in blockchain infrastructure tell that a lot of projects have gone in for production around the globe and some amazing work has taken place Says Sankalp Sharma, Co-founder & VP Engineering, Zeeve, "Being on the infrastructure side we get to see a lot of insights from our customers on what they are doing. Even the customers don't realize they are functioning on blockchain but actual businesses are operating in such ways. Some of the use cases that we thought are most difficult to implement have gone in for production. Few years back, we were missing out on tools and technologies but we came up with that. It took us decades to master Web 2.0 so it will take time for Web3 too to become cheap and efficient."

OTT platforms eyeing blockchain too

Even OTT platforms like Netflix are not hesitant to adopt blockchain in future. Says Tejas Chopras, Senior Software Engineer, Netflix, "At present Netflix is not exploring the blockchain, but it doesn't mean that it will not in the future. There are many ways. First and foremost, when it comes to expenditure, content creation takes up 80% of our expenses. We spend so much money on creating content. I think there lies an opportunity to democratize that part-thinking every movie release as an IPO. People participate and buy a token for the movie while it is being shot. And then when the movie releases people can exchange tokens, they can also get digital memorabilia from the movie."

Challenges

Experts think that the strength of the blockchain itself is a bottleneck. "This is because the technology thrives on the ecosystem and it's not natural for the companies to come together with their competitors without losing control. So the governance of the consortium, building that trust that one is not there to build an IP and it's for industry and for solving problems. That is the approach that takes some time for people to understand. Also, increasingly companies are committing to sustainability. However, we need to figure out how blockchain will do that because for storing blockchain each byte of data you multiply with the number of nodes so it's not very sustainable from that perspective." says Varun Dube, Head Blockchain at Lab 45, Wipro.

Integrating AI with blockchain is another crucial factor to be looked at. Says Ravi Sundararajan, Managing Partner & CEO, VirAstral, " AI is centralized while blockchain is decentralized. How do you marry these two things? The flaw in blockchain or web3 is that within on chain everything is fine but everything cannot be done on chain. So you have to get some information or validation from off chain. If information is spurious, then the whole smart contract is not valid."