The word “bitcoin” was a top search on Google this year, as everyone who didn’t understand the cryptocurrency (which was most of us) rushed to learn how it works and how they could make money off of it. Some people did make money, at least on paper. The price of one coin surged from less than $1,000 on January 1, 2017 to more than $18,000 by mid-December (as we write this).
But bitcoin’s value jump was probably not the most important event in crypto this year. It was the decentralized ledger technology that tracks bitcoin transactions–known as a blockchain–that really promised to shake up the world. This year, developers came up with hundreds of new use-cases for blockchains, and 2018 is likely to see a lot more exciting activity.
“As [blockchain] has joined the mainstream, it’s piqued the interest of millions of new people,” says Ben Siegel, impact policy manager at ConsenSys, an Ethereum development studio in Brooklyn. “We’re going to see a massive new influx of talent and brains into the space and that’s going to blow the roof off. We’ll see new ideas popping up all over the place.”
Here are a few ways blockchains could revolutionize 2018:
“I think we’re going to see a lot of traditional companies that aren’t blockchain-focused using ICOs as a mechanism to raise capital because it’s so much more efficient,” says Tiana Laurence, cofounder of blockchain developer Factom and author of the book Blockchain For Dummies.
ICOs allow startups to raise money from their future customers (who are rewarded with tokens they can use to buy goods and services from the company when it launches). They also offer a way to bypass venture capital firms and banks who want equity or high-interest payments in return for their money and who often serve only certain types of startups.
“Digital media today is controlled by two or three large players who amass hundreds of millions of dollars in enterprise value. Little of it goes to the people who constitute the network,” CEO Adi Sideman tells Fast Company. “Through blockchain, we can actually reward those people who are building the network alongside us.” Other tokenized media ideas include Everipedia, an alternative to Wikipedia, and Civil, a blockchain journalism platform.
The Republic of Georgia is putting land titles on a distributed ledger. Such systems could be bad news for the land title insurance industry, which covers new homeowners from unresolved claims on their land. Blockchain titling shows everyone exactly who owns what. “As soon as you put titling on a blockchain, you don’t have to pay anyone to insure something that you know to be a fact,” says Lou Kerner, an investor in blockchain startups.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. In 2018, blockchain could be adopted for a slew of other uses, including health insurance, medical data, cleaning up the advertising industry, voting, improving food safety, renewable energy, enabling refugees to own their digital identity, helping the homeless, and even orchestrating a universal basic income (not to mention a whole load of important applications in the financial services industry).
In other words, blockchain is much more than bitcoin. It has potential to help humanity in all sorts of ways, spreading wealth and opportunity more widely. “It’s cool that bitcoin is skyrocketing but we need to be talking about [issues like] self-sovereign identity, the 2 billion unbanked people in the world, and how we can open up new markets to include people in the economy,” says Siegel, at ConsenSys.
“Social impact has to be the dialogue driver or potentially we’re going to lose public trust. The most damaging thing as a space is if we’re simply [developing] a tool for making the rich richer.”