The blockchain is the hottest word on the internet. Even if you search it on Google, you can see some thousands of results popping up and everyday Google Trends will contain at least a single news regarding the Blockchain in the list.

Coupled with the LinkedIn groups, the social media platforms; Blockchain has… become one of the most amusing words out there among the tech geeks.

However, until today, most of the people relate blockchain to Bitcoin. While Bitcoin is exciting as a cryptocurrency, Blockchain is the underlying technology that holds all of these cryptocurrencies together.

Widely spread across the industries right from the wedding contracts to the comprehensive ecosystems, Blockchain is prominent among all.

Understanding these applications is easy if you know what Blockchain is. According to a blog associated with the Wall Street Journal, “A blockchain is a data structure that enables us to form a digital ledger for all the money transactions and to share it among a set of computers connected to the distributed network”.

Blockchain allows each participant to work with the ledger safely without any need for the central authority. Whenever a participant adds data, the participants will take leverage of the technology in order to verify this particular transaction and once it is verified, it is added to the chain.

1. It is used to reimagine the idea of crowdfunding:

Frank Holmes, from Global Investors, has written that it can be a greater disruptive technology than Amazon when it was back in 90.

The Blockchain allows the founders to raise the capital through crowdfunding by giving the investors to trade the stakes through the secure marketplaces through equity tokenization.

In other words, the startups don’t have to draft pitches for the investors, but only make a single pitch to gain a wider audience.

Investing usually means freezing capital for years till the startup gets the ROI without any possibility of exiting from it.

Therefore, through Blockchain technology, we can actually bring dynamism through tokenization. Whenever you want to take the investment out, these tokens can be sold in the market and cash even before the IPO.

Another benefit of the blockchain is that it is secure to process all kinds of financial transactions excluding the third parties. Therefore, there won’t be any human error, fraud alerts or data leaks.

2. It keeps out food safer:

Walmart is one of the biggest corporations that has adopted the use of blockchain solutions. This retailer has collaborated with IBM in order t use the Blockchain so that it can track the data based on safety, origin, and authenticity of the food items that they sell.

This technology has been used to increase the speed and as well as the reliability of the food that is being sold. Before using the blockchain, this process of tracing has taken Walmart around one to two weeks but now, everything is carried in a couple of seconds.

The most beneficial advantage of this association is that one can avert the Epidemics by determining where the food lot has come from with just a few clicks.

3. It is used to make the healthcare transparent:

Any healthcare system usually starts with diagnosis and therefore, all of them rely on many things including the data analysis, the accuracy, the frequency and the accessibility.

The blockchain makes sure that the diagnosis is complete by giving you all of the mentioned things, easily. We all know that Blockchain is mainly associated with transparency and it alone and therefore, it is hugely important in terms of privacy.

This full-fledged accessibility to people lays a foundation for the diagnosis and as well as the treatment of the patients offering safer treatment. In other words, the blockchain places the patient as the nuclei of the healthcare system while building walls or security and privacy around it.

It is indeed amusing to know that blockchain is usually used to exploit the decentralized network and take advantages of it, for various industrial participants while the Medical industry is focusing on the patients in order to read through the clinical data so that one can have entire control over the data to help in providing enhanced medical facilities to the patients.

4. It is also used for protecting the cloud:

Cloud has now become a bit old despite the fact that most of the organizations were dependant on it, to store the data in the centralized location.

However, with much technical advancements, cloud caused a cost in terms of data not being encrypted when it is hosted by third parties.

Therefore, to close this breach, blockchain technology is used to secure everything coming from the social security numbers to the personal photos.

This is because all the files that are stored on the ledger are not located at a single location which is why there won’t be any leaks.

All the data that is accessible will only be granted through the encryption key. Storj is one of those startups that has taken up this technology to stand up to competitors like Azure and Amazon aiming to implement a cheaper and faster cloud storage.

On a whole, blockchain technology can be taken beyond the cryptocurrencies and that includes bitcoin as well. In spite of all the benefits that it offers, it is not entirely immune to raise concerns about the protocol. New technologies are definitely hard to trust but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t as the main advantage of this technology is to provide a secure network.