Using Blockchain Technology to Differentiate Your Business - A Competitive Advantage Guide

Salomon Kisters

Mar 12, 2021

This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. Thanks!

Blockchain technology does not only allow the creation of brand-new use cases. In fact, it can be effectively used to transform the existing solutions as well and enable you to have competitive advantages in a particular niche, since it is a hot and popular technology these days.

If you happen to be an executive of a company, responsible for making impactful decisions, such as adopting blockchain technology, please note that in the current digital era, you need to think out of the box and not just about your business. For instance, in order for blockchain technology to be most beneficial (even if it’s implemented by a single organization), it should be able to be consumed by a variety of stakeholders.

Exploring the examples

For instance, one of the most popular niches on the internet happens to be photo-sharing communities. If your business provides royalty-free images, you could act as a perfect platform for various parties to connect and take advantage of blockchain technology.

To begin with, timestamping could be introduced at the time of uploading an image so as soon as the user uploads it on the platform, the date of creation together with the uploader’s signature can be attached to the IP. There are two major aspects to doing this. Firstly, the IP would always be protected, and secondly, you could provide a section on the website where viewers can simply enter the ID of the image to fetch its certificate or timestamp data.

OriginStamp’s SaaS-based solution can be used to offer this functionality quite easily as it’s generic and allows bulk processing as well, so you never have to worry about a poor user experience. Moreover, this implementation can also be very beneficial for certificate issuing bodies, particularly those working in the academic sector. If an online academy provides an e-learning facility, the candidates can easily earn blockchain-based certificates at the end of the course. Apart from ensuring that the students never have to provide attested copies of their certificates every time they apply somewhere, the employers can also save plenty of time by entering the unique certificate ID on the system to see the following:

• Hash of the certificate
• Time of issuance
• Issuer
• Receiver

These advancements will give you an explicit and competitive advantage over your competitors. Moreover, these implementations also pave way for removing redundancy from the system and ensuring that the system does not have a single point of failure in an unforeseen circumstance.

It should also be noted that security and privacy can be protected with the help of blockchain technology. For instance, if we talk about an expensive painting that is sold online or via physical auction, everyone knows the name of the involved parties and the amount. However, if a confidential item is being sold, there is no way to protect the sensitive data in traditional systems and this is where OriginStamp can prove its efficacy.

Since the use of social media is increasing exponentially for sharing videos and these are vital sources for spreading information, it is important to ensure that the provenance of videos can be tracked as well. Therefore, whenever a video is uploaded or live-streamed on a social media website or app, the timestamping tool at the backend can store its record on a public ledger so every viewer can verify the date and time and the creator of the video. It does not only grant IP rights to a unique owner but also allows the World to track down an individual in case of a security crisis.

In the past, several artworks have been stolen and plagiarized before being sold at their original price tags. Since this industry is one of the most lucrative ones and appreciates the use of technology quite impressively, the implementation of the new buzzword ‘blockchain’ could really make a firm touch new heights of success from the following two perspectives:

• The popularity in the niche and competitive advantage over other market players
• Ability to track every artwork and its sale and purchase with proper invoicing in a digital and decentralized environment

How blockchain technology fulfills non-functional requirements?

Apart from the fact that it allows robust fulfillment of functional requirements of a business and gives it a competitive advantage, there are several other pros that are offered automatically when you implement the blockchain technology in your use cases.

Better compliance

Although jurisdictional compliance is important for all businesses, their weightage is significantly higher in the European and North American regions.

Since the ledger acts as a single source of truth and is not influenced by any administrator, it contains a list of immutable actions performed on the blockchain and therefore, auditors do not have to spend unnecessary time validating the source of audit records as they can trust it and just focus on any potential discrepancies.

Efficient management

In traditional systems, entire management is done by issuing notices, making notes, preparing checklists, sending memorandums, and then taking acknowledgments. This entire lifecycle wastes a significant amount of time.

However, with the help of blockchain technology, the management and supervision of tasks can be automated with the help of smart contracts that are executed in a decentralized environment. Please note that due to the generic and scalable nature of these agreements, an infinite number of future use cases can be built on top of the existing platform.

Thus, ensuring that the systems can scale both horizontally and vertically and new management tasks can also be made efficient.

Wider access

In the systems where IP validations and protection hold importance, it is crucial to be available for a variety of markets and people belonging to different walks of life, rather than operating in a niche market. This is also referred to as inclusion and it’s on the rise, particularly after the introduction of the Ethereum blockchain.

In order to understand this, it is important to consider an example. For instance, in traditional educational organizations, when a certificate is to be verified, the student must physically visit the office and then get it stamped in a language that is accepted by the employer as well. However, in the case of a blockchain-based system, nobody has to worry about the language or any other factor. Every verification data that is required by the employer, in this case, can easily be provided by OriginStamp or any other blockchain timestamping tool, without any issues related to language or format mismatch.

Better availability

Since blockchain-based systems do not have a single point of failure due to their decentralized nature, it is almost impossible that the network could ever be compromised in terms of resources. Therefore, the uptime of the system can be guaranteed at times of higher bandwidth consumption as well and a system as complex as a photo or video-sharing app can stay available whenever the authorized users access it.

Conclusion

It is quite evident that blockchain has immense potential in elevating your business standards, compliance and of course, giving you an obvious advantage over your competitors.

Since OriginStamp provides great feasibility in this regard, it can be used to not only protect the businesses dealing with IP rights but also offers some out-of-the-box features as listed above. Another great perk is that since most of our competitors provide platform-dependent solutions, based on web and desktop, OriginStamp is purely a SaaS-based offering that can be used in practically any system.

Moreover, from the user’s perspective, the integrations do not just take care of the direct systems that they are attached to. For instance, if your business allows uploading royalty-free images or videos, you can provide an option to import the file directly from cloud storage systems, such as Google Drive, One Drive, Outlook, etc. While it increases the user experience to much bigger heights, it gives a clear business advantage to anyone consuming our APIs.

Since OriginStamp falls under the GDPR compliance, the users do not have to worry about their data being exposed on the internet or sold to different 3rd parties as we do not even keep the actual data. We simply convert the fed data to a cryptographic hash that can also be considered a fingerprint of the user, which is used to identify the data that you submitted initially. So firstly, no one can access the data but even for the sake of argument, if we suppose a hacker penetrates the system, he can never reverse engineer the hash to reveal the content of the file that you had uploade

Stay informed with the latest insights in Crypto, Blockchain, and Cyber-Security! Subscribe to our newsletter now to receive exclusive updates, expert analyses, and current developments directly to your inbox. Don't miss the opportunity to expand your knowledge and stay up-to-date.

Please note that the Content may have been generated with the Help of AI. The editorial content of OriginStamp AG does not constitute a recommendation for investment or purchase advice. In principle, an investment can also lead to a total loss. Therefore, please seek advice before making an investment decision.