Progress of blockchain technology now includes financial, automotive and government sectors

Authour:Enterprise360 Site: www.em360tech.com

Blockchain may be a technology that a lot of people still don’t quite understand, but it’s already having a significant impact on many industries.

In the latest developments, blockchain is being utilised in the automotive sector by Toyota and Daimler for different applications, and Indian politicians are looking into the technology for e-governance initiatives.

The financial sector has been scrutinising blockchain for quite some time, since the technology started out as the basis for online payments using digital currencies such as bitcoin.

In simple terms, Blockchain is often referred to as a “digital handshake” between two computers on the internet. The record of that handshake includes numerous blocks which have timestamps and other details of their own.

That record is stored using a distributed computing system using what’s called “high Byzantine fault tolerance”. In software terminology, blockchain is said to be “secure by design”, which means that its original construction and subsequent development was always intended to be secure.

This fundamental appeal of blockchain – its supposedly high-security – is what is making it attractive to a variety of industries, not just the financial sector.

Toyota, one of the world’s largest automotive companies, has teamed up with the MIT university to develop blockchain security for driverless cars, according to Fortune.com.

Given that a lot of autonomous technology is already integrated into new cars on the road now, the Toyota-MIT blockchain initiative might find its way into the real world sooner rather than later.

Daimler, the German automaker which owns the Mercedes-Benz marque, has launched a corporate bond worth €100 million as part of a blockchain project.

Daimler is partnering with three of Germany’s largest state-backed banks on the project, which is said to enable and manage lending and other transactions from end to end.

The Linux Foundation is also part of the Daimler project, according to CoinDesk.com.

And IBM, never far from blockchain development initiatives, is teaming up with seven European banks to create what it calls a “Digital Trade Chain”, to enable the tracking and management of international transactions.

Wiebe Draijer, chairman at Rabobank, told CNBC in a TV interview: “We take care of the payment that’s still the old payment technology, but the whole infrastructure, the administration is done on the blockchain.

“And ultimately we will also move the payment into that blockchain solution, when the payment in blockchain is ready to be robust for large-scale application.”

As well as Rabobank, other banks involved in the IBM project include Deutsch Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Societe Generale and Unicredit.

India, meanwhile is looking at blockchain for perhaps a more ambitious project – governing the country of 1.3 billion people.

Two Indian states in the federation are working with blockchain startup companies to initially develop ways of securing government data, while exploring possible future applications.

An IT advisor to the Indian government, JA Chowdary, seems to think that blockchain will eliminate the problem of hacking.

As quoted in ETHNews.com, Chowdary says: “All our sensitive data is in digital format. With blockchain, even if someone hacks, our data will be safe.”