5 Top emerging Blockchain technology trends to follow in 2021

By Leandra Monteiro

As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been garnering attention in India, the focus has turned to blockchain. Blockchain in the country is making inroads at a swifter pace than before and is gaining a lot of curiosity on ways it can make companies more efficient and their transactions safe.

This has led blockchain companies to constantly reinvent the wheel to see how technology can be applied optimally, coming up with new and innovative ways to help firms reduce costs, enhance processes, customer data tracking, and security, ensure product safety and deal with fraud and counterfeiting.

Blockchain is being looked at by both big and small businesses to streamline their operations. The pandemic has led to a huge shift to digital platforms, making blockchain more relevant to ensure safe and transparent transactions. Though the technology is still in the nascent phase in India, its potential across the board is enormous.

Here are the 5 top trends-

BaaS – Blockchain-as-a-Service: Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) is the third-party creation and management of cloud-based networks for companies in the business of building blockchain applications. BaaS is based on the software as a service (SaaS) model and allows customers to leverage cloud-based solutions to build, host, and operate their own blockchain apps and related functions on the blockchain. BaaS help the customers in a faster application development, low maintenance cost and fast adoption of Blockchain technologies.

VC & SSI – Verifiable Credential & Self Sovereign Identity (Universal Identity): Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) offers verifiable, globally resolvable, and privacy-preserving credentials that we store and manage from the security of our own devices and can show it to anyone, anywhere. It can be used for industry that can be used for personal identification purposes. e.g. claim benefits, bank account, loan, insurance, healthcare services etc.

DeFi – Decentralized Finance: Decentralized finance (DeFi) is shifting from traditional centralized financial systems such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains.

NFT – Non-Fungible Tokens: A NFT (non-fungible token) is a special cryptographically-generated token that uses blockchain technology to link with a unique digital asset that cannot be replicated. NFT digital content represented as tokens which ascribe provenance to uniquely distinguishable assets by artist, gaming companies, content creators, is driving a new wave of crypto adoption. One recent report by market insights on NFTs, says that in 2020, NFT trading was worth over $250 million.

CBDC – Central Bank Digital Currency: A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs) is a digital form of central bank money based on Blockchain, which is a legal tender created and backed by a central bank. Many CBDC pilot projects are going on across the globe. The Indian government has released its National Blockchain Strategy in Jan 2021 and is also introducing a bill to launch its own digital currency.

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