What’s the potential of blockchain technology?

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Robert Brunner is the associate dean for innovation and chief disruption officer at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he helped spearhead efforts to create iBlock, the first blockchain created by a business school. Brunner spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the potential of blockchain technology for businesses.To get more news about blockchain events, you can visit wikifx.com official website.

There’s been a lot of hype about blockchain technology, which undergirds cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, and its potential to transform industries ranging from health care to government. What is the strategic value of blockchain technology?
The biggest selling point about blockchains is that they’re public and transparent. You can see what’s on them. If you’re an investor, how do you know whether or not to invest in a company? Right now, you’re limited to the offerings that are available to the public such as quarterly reports or statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. You’re trusting that those reports are fair and accurate, and that they weren’t leaked to a certain group of investors early who front-run the market to reap large profits. So fundamentally, there’s a lot of trust you have to put into the current system. You have to trust that everybody’s playing by the same rules, the data is fair and accurate, and that whoever was auditing those statements and the company’s financials were fair and honest brokers.

You also have to trust that the SEC is going to go after bad actors who misbehave – but meanwhile, you may have made a bad investment, lost money and there’s nothing you can do about it.Now imagine that a company’s entire financial records were on a blockchain that was transparent. You could go in, audit the books and know instantaneously the value of that company. That kind of transparency highlights the promise of blockchain technology. The same argument could be made for government data, health care data, higher education data and many other industries. There’s a huge opportunity for innovation here, and we certainly don’t want to handcuff startups, researchers, or entrepreneurs to be able to do things because cryptocurrency, which uses blockchain technology, is slumping in the markets right now.

There’s a famous saying: “Trust but verify.” What blockchains allow us to do is trust and verify. Now, there will be areas where data must be protected, such as corporate secrets or medical data, which can’t be floating freely visible on a blockchain for the world to see.

But there are blockchain technologies, such as zero-knowledge proofs and layer chains, that hide some or all of the data but enable applications to verify information without compromising security. A simple example would be that you probably don’t want everyone to know how much money you have in your bank account, but you do want a financial entity or an individual to know that you have enough money to pay back a loan. With blockchain technology you could prove your creditworthiness in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of days or weeks in a fair and transparent manner. A zero-knowledge proof, for example, would allow somebody to verify that you have sufficient reserves in your bank account without them knowing your exact balance or your transaction history. A different blockchain could function to verify your salary history.

As a result, if your lender were to use a blockchain, you wouldn’t have to share your Social Security number, credit reports and other financial data with a third-party when you’re applying for a mortgage.Another good example would be high school or college transcripts. Blockchain technology would allow you to provide limited access to that data to specific individuals or organizations. It’s possible that you don’t want everyone in the world to know your grades from your senior year, but it would be great to have a quick, easy way for others to verify your degree or to know the specific classes you took at a given college.