Blockchain Technology Use Cases

Blockchain recently received an increasing attention from the industrial and research fields as well as a wide coverage from the media, as it enables the creation of a shared (worldwide) ledger maintained on a peer-to-peer basis, where autonomous programs (the smart contracts) can be executed. From the technological point of view, the blockchain is still far from a mainstream adoption, mainly due to scalability issues and because the interaction with it is still complex and requires technical skills. Given blockchain’s (and smart contracts’) advantages and technical limitations, it is difficult, for a company, to decide whether to invest in this technology or not, and to identify potential successful use cases. The objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with practical information to perform this choice. In particular, the chapter first provides a glossary of blockchain-related terms and then shows existing and under development use cases belonging to different sectors. Presented use cases are then discussed, to identify which sectors could benefit the most from blockchain and smart contracts, highlighting the most promising use cases in which this technology could be disrupting, and underlying the ones where advantages of relying on it are only marginal.