In the near future, blockchain could change how every business transaction is recorded, tracked, and stored.

According to Gartner, the business value-add of blockchain is expected to grow to more than $176 billion by 2025, and to exceed $3.1 trillion by 2030.

Alanna Gombert -general manager of IAB Tech Lab- said that this year is not about data anymore, this is the year of blockchain.

A Deloitte survey found that 35 percent of health and life sciences executives plan to implement some form of blockchain technology within the year.

Right now, blockchain is being implemented by some of the industry's biggest names such as IBM and Microsoft.

Blockchain represents a way of storing and linking data in a distributed manner to establish trust between users. Data relating a digital transaction is added to a block and then through advanced cryptographic functions, each block is linked to the previous block, forming a chain of blocks. 

The safety of blockchain transactions is assured by the fact that in order to be every transaction needs to be validated by all participants. Each participant in the blockchain network maintains their own copy of that database. Since all records are chained together, all records are immutable. This means that if a previous record is altered, the copy of every participant in the blockchain will be changed.

Blockchain ensures privacy through the process of data transformation. Information such name, contact details, and passwords are transformed into a numeric value of a fixed length called a hash value in computing terms. This provides a unique token that can be quickly indexed in a database, making the user practically anonymous to all the parties within the chain.

Blockchain can transform practices in a number of IoT sectors. For supply chains, it can track the location of goods as they are shipped, ensuring that they stay within specified condition. Blockchain can track assets and machinery by monitoring in order to record activity and output as an alternative to cloud solutions. For the healthcare sector, it can enable logging and sharing of medical data between numerous stakeholders, directly holding some data while offering encrypted links to other information.

For the media industry, blockchain technology can be used for monetization processes, ad buying, preventing fraud in collaborative advertising and marketing projects, and whitelisting.

Regarding monetization, blockchain content distribution platform Decent launched Publiq, a “rewarding” process that will let writers and creators distribute content on the blockchain and get paid immediately.

Comcast’s advanced advertising group developed a new technology that allows companies to make ad buys on both broadcast and over-the-top TV through blockchain technology.

According to adChain White Paper, the solutions offered by this open protocol on the public Ethereum blockchain provide the building of decentralized applications for the digital advertising ecosystem. One of the solutions is the adChain Registry, a smart contract which stores domain names accredited as non-fraudulent by ADT holders.

dApps (decentralized applications) that will utilize the adChain protocol will drive adoption across the thousands of advertisers, publishers and technology providers, in the digital advertising ecosystem. This will enable them to run campaigns that leverage the power of Ethereum, while maintaining the familiar user experience of legacy tools.

Alex Tapscott- the author of “Blockchain Revolution” declared that blockchain has encountered few technical barriers, proving itself robust and adaptable to dozens of high-impact use cases.

Blockchain technology is perfect for projects that need management for complex transactions, where there is no trust between the parties and has a community that can validate every transaction.