Blockchain is growing, and it’s bigger than just a platform for cryptocurrency. This roundup from CMS Wire highlights growing trends in the industry. Blockchain is being integrated into areas like 3D printing, smart contracts, and much more. Click through to read about these applications and other trends in the growing blockchain industry; including supply chain applications, managing data, and more.
By David Roe
Blockchain, as we have seen, is quickly becoming an established enterprise technology. There is still way to go, however, before it reaches its full potential. In the meantime, there are a number of emerging and established trends around blockchain that are gaining traction at the moment. There are new technologies and capabilities emerging almost daily as well as new job market demands to build these new technologies. Here are several that we've identified as common themes for blockchain companies.
1. Beyond Cryptocurrency
Mark Grabowski is an associate professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, and teaches a course on bitcoin and blockchain. He points out that bitcoin is the first and best known use case of blockchain. However, cryptocurrency like bitcoin is just one application of blockchain. Blockchain has been used in voting, food safety and shipping, among many other fields and industries. Major companies, including Walmart, IBM and Amazon, are all experimenting with blockchain. “In fact, while there's much debate over the future of Bitcoin (is it a bubble?), one thing you can probably bet on is that the underlying technology of blockchain will at least succeed and be widely adopted, even if cryptocurrency turns out to just be a fad,” he said.
2. Blockchain For Printing
LINK3D, an Additive Manufacturing (AM) software company focused on software advancements for the 3D Printing Industry, has recently unveiled an integration of blockchain technology. For AM, blockchain technology offers middleware to stabilize an untrusted distributed network that continues to gain momentum and popularity in major industries. Blockchain technology is now integrated in LINK3D’s SaaS product, Digital Factory that they launched in 2017. This is a major enhancement to the product that enables enterprises to apply data governance, identify data provenance, ensure data auditability and data validation.
Image credit: Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash
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