Blockchain technology is about far more than just Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. We see innovations happening every day across healthcare, finance, media, government and other sectors. Here are some examples:
Music Royalties
Traditionally Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud are all centralized music platforms. Artists split the profits with these companies. Royalty system, the current system is outdated and unreliable. An estimated USD 250 million of money is wrongly distributed. Streaming platforms are set at a pay-per-play rate of $0.004 on Spotify, 230 plays needed for artists to earn $1. Artists receive a cut of royalties and they cannot be paid without an accurate record of all contributors in a song. Payments are around 3-6 months delayed.
All these problems can be solved with blockchain. Artists can receive equitable royalty payments, much faster payments with accurate metadata, and complete records of all contributors. Blockchain can also track the entire music creation process, prevent counterfeit tickets, help record companies trace music streams, and make it easier to pay all the artists who contributed.
NFTs, a form of cryptocurrency, holds assets like art, tickets, or trademarks. These can be applied to music. They’re digital collectibles, that cannot be copied, and are easy to trade. This will help remove the middleman in transactions. No need for a company like Spotify to take a cut of the profits. The network can be maintained by everyone. Music can go straight from the artist to the listener.
Paying royalties, from labels to artists can be a long and laborious process with lots of paperwork that could be shortened from 5 days to seconds on the blockchain. This could help artists keep track of all sources of revenue. If we could eliminate the complicated mess of music multi-ownership. For example, booking a musician for an event, directly on the blockchain, no middleman costs, it’s also easier for fans to donate to their favourite artists. This can help emerging artists create a more diverse market.
Companies that are already using blockchain:
Healthcare
Traditional problems include data insecurity, inefficient systems and much more. There are data breaches and miscommunication between healthcare workers that cost the industry 11 billion dollars a year. From 2009-2017 there were over 176 million data breaches in healthcare records. The system takes a lot of time to pass around patient information as many of the medical records are still on paper. Even when the data is digital, the systems for passing the information to the required parties on time are slow and the costs are high.
The solutions that blockchain provides are that the healthcare data is not stored on a public blockchain but only accessed by authorized people, the records are immutable, there is higher data security, and everyone has a public identifier and a private key. Linked transaction blocks make changing the digital record unrealistic with strong encryption and cryptographic techniques to ensure that the data is valid. This creates a secure network infrastructure. Participants can be verified with authentication. This one system can be a decentralized ledger of all data which makes it easier for all doctors and hospitals to access, faster diagnosis and personalization to treatment, easy to switch patients between providers, and patients can share their health data with other organizations using a shareable private key. This reduces costs and improves efficiency. A cheap single ledger means it’s easy to find required data and there are no costly medical errors from miscommunication. The five main areas are electronic medical record or EMR data, personal health record data management, point-of-care genomics management, health records data management, and protection of healthcare data.
Possible places to apply blockchain are mobile health apps. It could offer remote monitoring using IoT sensors. Tracking the supply chain of medical supplies, health insurance claims, tracking outbreaks and diseases, reporting diseases, tracing back to its origin and protecting genomic data from DNA sequencing.
Companies that are already using blockchain:
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