Usecases of Blockchain

Blockchain has made waves by showing a valuable contribution to the financial services industry.

10 Things You Should Know About Blockchain, already covers background on the blockchain.

The fundamental premise of Blockchain is an incredibly simple one at heart - it's a database of sorts created in a different way and it facilitates any and everyone to undertake transactions between each other. When you consider this fact, we see that Blockchain may potentially be used whenever and wherever there's some form of exchange between two parties, and it really needn't be solely financial.

Here, we will look at the main use-cases of blockchains,

Crypto-currency

Bitcoin, one of the highest trading cryptocurrencies, is one of the main drivers of blockchain popularity. But use cases of blockchain are not limited to cryptocurrency. Basically, in Bitcoin transactions, Blockchain provides evidence of the activity, trades, and transfers on the network. A block is the current or real-time part of a blockchain that records some or all the latest transactions, and once the activity is complete, it goes into the blockchain which acts as a permanent database in a public ledger. Each time a block is completed, a brand new block is generated and this leads to an endless quantum of such blocks in the blockchain.

Whilst Bitcoin fuelled greater consciousness of Blockchain, it's key is to keep in mind that a blockchain is a cryptographically protected and publicly hosted record of events and agreed upon variables. The real defining feature isn't what it does or how it does it, instead, it holds value based on how much users can trust Blockchain network to do these services impartially. Blockchain has really got the financial services industry buzzing with the Bank of England to assess the best to harness the technology, and where the Bank of America has already applied for no less than 15 patents. Ref: CNBC post

The backbone of the Financial institution.

With its Blockchain network, Ripple is the digital asset which is trying to solve traditional method of settling financial transaction among big financial institutions. Unlike bitcoin, Ripple is faster for processing transactions with its blockchain network. Ripple's blockchain network, RippleNet claims to settle 1000s of transactions per second as compared to 10 minutes for a single transaction on the Bitcoin network. This efficiency and scalability factor making Ripple's use of blockchain technology lucrative for global financial institutions such as banks as compared to bitcoin or traditional mechanisms.

Refer to the side-by side differences between Bition Vs Ripple

Smart-contracts:

Smart contracts on the Blockchain network are self-executing contracts.  Terms of the agreement between buyer and seller are directly written into lines of code. Since these agreements are distributed across a decentralized blockchain network, it allows contracts to be executed among anonymous entities without any central authority such as the government.

Ethereum blockchain is one of the popular platforms for smart contracts. Ethereum is an open blockchain platform that allows anyone to build and use decentralized applications that run on blockchain technology. Like Bitcoin, no one controls or owns Ethereum - it's an open-source project built by many individuals around the globe. Unlike the Bitcoin protocol, Ethereum is designed to be adaptable and flexible. It's simple to create new applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain platform, and with the Homestead release, it's now safe for anybody to use those applications. In late 2013, Ethereum's inventor Vitalik Buterin proposed that a single blockchain with the capacity to be reprogrammed to perform any arbitrarily complex calculation could subsume these numerous other projects.

In the year 2014, Ethereum founders Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke started working on a next-generation blockchain that had the aspirations to implement a general, fully trusted smart contract platform. As opposed to giving users a set of predefined operations, Ethereum allows users to create their very own operations of any complexity they wish. Ethereum in the narrow sense refers to a suite of protocols that define a platform for decentralized applications. In the heart of it is the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which can execute code of arbitrary algorithmic complexity. In computer science terms, Ethereum is Turing complete.

Like any blockchain, Ethereum also features a peer-to-peer network protocol. The Ethereum blockchain database is maintained and updated by many nodes connected to the network. For this reason, Ethereum is sometimes described evocatively as a World computer. This massive parallelization of computing across the entire Ethereum blockchain network isn't done to make computation much more efficient. Rather, every Ethereum blockchain node runs the EVM in order to maintain consensus across the blockchain. Decentralized consensus gives Ethereum extreme levels of fault tolerance, ensures zero downtime, and makes data stored on the block permanently unalterable and censorship-resistant. The Ethereum platform itself is devoid of value agnostic.

Particularly, the ethereum blockchain is suitable for applications that automate direct interaction among peers or facilitate coordinated group action across a network. Theoretically, financial interactions or exchanges of any complexity might be carried out automatically and reliably using code running on Ethereum. Beyond financial applications, any environments where trust, security, and permanence are important - for example, asset registries, voting, governance, and the internet of things - might be enormously impacted by the Ethereum platform. Ethereum blockchain incorporates many features and technology which will be familiar to users of Bitcoin, while also introducing many adjustments and innovations of its own.

Refer to the side-by-side differences between Bitcoin Vs Ethereum

The backbone to Internet of Things

As the world is moving towards connected things, there would a requirement for trusted communication and layer of security among those connective devices.

Here comes IOTA blockchain. It is a transactional settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things. It’s based on a distributed ledger, the Tangle, which overcomes the inefficiencies of current Blockchain designs and introduces a new way of reaching consensus in a decentralized peer-to-peer system. For the first time ever, through IOTA people can transfer money without any fees. This means that even infinitesimally small nano payments can be made through the IOTA blockchain. The nano-payments are required if connected devices want to use the processing bandwidth of nearby devices to settle the cost among themselves.

These are the few main core pillars for blockchain use-cases. Having said that, the derivations or extensions of these core blockchain use-cases can span across most of the day-to-day activities.