By: Uttara Choudhury

The 2018 edition of the One Globe Forum brought together top-level experts and business leaders to review bitcoin’s technology endoskeleton, blockchain. For many tech insiders, the most exciting thing about bitcoin is the thing that allows it to function: blockchain. They see tremendous disruptive potential in this open, shared digital ledger platform. “There has been much excitement in recent weeks about bitcoin. Many people may never have heard about blockchain if bitcoin hadn’t run up to nearly $20,000 in December 2017,” said panel moderator Kunal Nandwani, Co-founder and CEO, of Cove Identity.

“Relatively few folks, though, have focused much attention on the blockchain technology that enables cryptocurrencies to function as they do. Yet, this technology is being evaluated for numerous applications apart from cryptocurrencies,” said Mr Nandwani, a serial entrepreneur, who earlier co-founded UK-based blockchain focused company Hashcove Limited,which has technology around smart contracts, crypto exchanges and wallets.

Originally devised as the digital scaffolding for Bitcoin transactions, the tech community is now finding other potential uses for blockchain technology. When devising bitcoin, pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto’s aim was to create a stateless virtual currency, not controlled by any bank or government. “Bitcoin and Blockchain are not only about technology but trust. Without any third-party or government acting as a guarantor, how could you ensure users did not cheat and spend their coins more than once? The solution was to entrust oversight to the whole network,” said Mr Nandwani.

All transactions are etched on a public log — the blockchain — maintained by a peer-to-peer swarm of computers (or “nodes”), each holding an identical copy of the ledger. When users spend their coins, nodes take note and update the ledger. “Blockchains are immutable. Once data has been written to a blockchain no one can change it. No blockchain transaction has failed to date,” said Mr Nandwani. The “decentralized structure” ensures that there is no single point of failure, making it nearly impossible to hack the network, forge transactions, or freeze them for legal purposes, noted “The Guardian.” The newspaper went on to explain that “you don’t need intermediaries to ensure parties will act with integrity, because the very platform you’re transacting on does that for you.” Trust is not achieved by middlemen but by cryptography, collaboration and clever code.

“How do you see humans evolving through the ages to the Internet Age and now to the Blockchain Age?” asked Mr Nandwani. Panelist Hasan Davulcu, Associate Professor, Arizona State University, responded by saying that the Blockchain Age would challenge the economic order. “The new is going to emerge very rapidly and exponentially. The old is going to die a slow death. The Blockchain Age buzzwords are revealing as they tell you everything about what is prized in the new economy: Transparency, sharing, smart logic, crowd sourcing, crowd funding, open source, distributed ledgers, decentralized,” said Mr Davulcu.

The notion that blockchain has significant potential not just for business but in society as a whole has begun to gain traction in India. “Our ancestors used to share almost everything in a village and that’s how their economy ran. That trust disappeared as our societies grew. But that trust factor can easily be built up through a blockchain network,” said fellow panelist Ashwarya Pratap Singh, Co-founder and CEO of peer-to-peer bike and car rental company Drivezy. This is exactly the sharing economy that Mr Singh and his business partners are trying to build at Drivezy.

Drivezy runs a platform that allows car and bike owners to lease their vehicles to the company, which in turn rents them out to customers. The company has over 1,300 cars listed by more than 800 owners. Drivezy says it has more than 500,000 registered users. It recently raised $5 million, as part of its first round of initial coin offering (ICO) in Japan. “This ICO was part of our vision to leverage the power of the blockchain to build an open, secure and transparent technology to globalize the Indian car sharing marketplace,” said Mr Singh.

Companies like Drivezy don’t just represent a new way of thinking or new services, but a new way to use data effectively to provide services to people when and where they want them. It has developed its own platform to allow service providers and users to connect to the benefit of both. “We were growing 15-to-16 percent month on month but once we incorporated blockchain we are growing 45 percent,” said Mr Singh. He said India should focus on creating jobs and micro entrepreneurs in the sharing economy by building peer-to-peer marketplaces on open source bitcoin and blockchain technology.

“I think cryptocurrency is just a use case for blockchain that is unnecessarily hyped. If you are an investor, invest in a platform and you can get a pretty decent return,” said panelist Ravinder Pal Singh, Chief Information and Innovation Officer, Tata Singapore. He added that the blockchain projects with interoperability at their core would survive the test of time and adaptability.

The fledgling blockchain industry has piqued the interest of investors with blue chips in the tech and financial sectors eager to tap into the technology's potential returns. “We are really excited about blockchain technology. We will definitely back it up. We will invest in companies that are a blockchain play,” said fellow panelist Prasad Vanga, Founder and Chief Accelerator, Anthill Ventures.

Mr Vanga pointed out that blockchain had multiple uses and financial institutions including banks have started experimenting with their own private ledgers in the hope of streamlining the transfer of stocks and financial products. The nature of blockchain — a distributed ledger that records information in a tamper-proof, trustworthy way — has the potential to make all sorts of services and transactions more affordable, and include individuals who have been at the margins into the global economy. “Andhra Pradesh is working with a startup ChromaWay on a land registration pilot that uses blockchain to track the ownership of property,” said Mr Vanga.

Quartz, a guide to the new global economy, noted that the “very principles that blockchain is based on — openness, democratic access, transparency — have a leveling effect that will accelerate its adoption,” as there is no established hierarchy that decides who gets to participate. Gartner, which delivers technology research, projects that blockchain will result in $176 billion in added business value by 2025, and $3.1 trillion by 2030.