How Blockchain Can Flush Out Bad Actors in Digital Ownership Space
Blockchain technology being one of the world’s most influential technology has shown its resilience and importance in solving world issues. One of the biggest issues that it could do away with is cyber fraud.
Flushing Out Bad Actors?
Blockchain technology has great potential to minimize fraudulent activities when it comes to digital ownership space. It is the internet in every sense. Anyone can see and share each block of data that makes up your history and anyone else’s. Your identity isn’t tied to one site or server but all of them in a distributed network. Here, every participant has the same access to all the data at once.
There’s also no need for a third party to verify transaction authenticity because one of the properties of blockchain is that each transaction only gets added to the chain if it hasn’t been yet—making it totally transparent. In this article, we shall dive into how blockchain is the ideal solution to flash out bad actors in the digital ownership space. Let’s dive in:
Land Registry in Real Estate
The property market is booming, but the traditional system of handing over ownership to others is archaic. Property titles are a mess, which can lead to failed transactions and endless legal challenges. They’re also a huge liability risk for banks, as they don’t have good information on who has valid consent and ownership of an asset. If someone tries to transfer an asset using dodgy paperwork or forged signatures, it could result in significant losses for investors and banks.
Blockchain technology is already transforming the real estate industry. It’s essentially the backbone of a new generation of decentralized applications that provide transparency and legitimacy to property transactions, making them more efficient, secure, and scalable. Here we discuss how blockchain can help automate the process, ensuring your deal is smart and efficient.
Many countries are now testing land title registrations based on blockchain technology. Some initiatives, like those in Sweden, are motivated by the need to increase productivity in a field strongly dependent on transactions. Others, such as those in India and Honduras, desire to bolster property rights and improve transparency in a corrupt system.
Blockchain-based land registries might make a safe, decentralized, publicly verifiable, and immutable record system possible, allowing individuals to confirm their property ownership unambiguously. These qualities make land ownership more durable overall and make it less likely for property rights to be used for personal gain.
With a blockchain land registry system, there is no need for further paper documentation. The data is verified on the blockchain and stored in the chain’s ‘tangle’ database. To write a new entry for an asset or transaction, a user must first publish it and then perform the computation to confirm that they have reached a consensus on their part. Therefore there is no error or defect in their work, permanently recording the information on the chain.
Safe Transactions
Another lucrative utility brought forth by the blockchain model is smart contracts. These self-executing automated contracts are programs that can facilitate the exchange of anything of value, including property, without needing an intermediary.
A smart contract written to sell a piece of real estate establishes conditions under which funds move from one party to another. Take, for example, buying a house and wanting it sold by a specific date. In this case, you could schedule an exact time when the transaction will happen; it could even automatically trigger if particular criteria are met (e.g., closing within sixty days). With smart contracts, sellers no longer need a lawyer because there’s no room for error or misunderstanding — the contract is finalized and approved before putting it in escrow.
Examples of decentralized applications that can help record, track and transfer land titles, property deeds, liens, mortgages, and more include Propy and Ubitquity’s SaaS. Propy seeks to offer secure home buying through a blockchain-based smart contract platform. All documents are signed and securely stored online, while deeds and other contracts are recorded using blockchain technology and on paper.
Tech startup Ubitquity offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) blockchain platform for financial, title, and mortgage companies. The company is working with Washington-based Stewart Title, among other stealth clients, to record documents and create token-based property titles using blockchain tech.
Tackling Government Corruption
Public procurement, also known as government contracting, is the single most significant source of public spending and official corruption worldwide. Due to various factors, this government procedure is plagued with corruption in high-income and low-income countries. Vendors are selected through convoluted, opaque, and highly subjective processes. These problems usually lead to poor quality products and ineffective services, substantial financial waste, pricing distortion, and less healthy competition.
Blockchain technologies have the potential to function as an essential tool in ushering in a new era of transparency and accountability in government. Indeed, the technology’s most significant impact can be seen in its ability to work in tandem with existing legal frameworks, political systems, and social structures. A Blockchain-based process could help address procurement’s corruption-risk factors by increasing transparency, efficiency, and accountability through automated smart contracts accessible to third-party oversight.
Following recent corruption scandals, there is a global concern about unclear or hidden beneficial corporate ownership. Employing clandestine companies to pay bribes, launder money, or sway government investment for personal advantage is simple.
However, with the blockchain, evidence of a transaction or investment is publically available, traceable, and easily accessible through a decentralized network. This infrastructure can allow governments and activists to track hidden corporate ownership and data, potentially exposing corrupt businesses or individuals who try to hide their assets.
Blockchain in Voting
The blockchain community is keen on embracing new technologies that could help ensure the integrity of our democratic processes. Blockchain can be an excellent way to keep voter information secure and transparent, which could help prevent fraud in voting and increase confidence in election outcomes. As a decentralized ledger of votes, blockchain could also help ensure that votes are tabulated consistently across polls and locations in real-time.
Using a custom blockchain record to capture votes, Agora and Follow My Vote are developing end-to-end voting solutions that allow voters to cast their votes without any chance of mistakes or unknown outcomes affecting the outcome.
Blockchain in Charity
Blockchain is a secure, shared technology that donors can use to build a transparent and efficient process for humanitarian aid and development programs. The technology likely disintermediates the process by reducing the number of actors involved in grant awards, disbursements, and management and reducing fraud that occurs when many people are interested in financial transactions.
Blockchain-based organizations like the BitGive Foundation provide greater transparency and accountability around charitable donations. With GiveTrack, they can deliver a secure and transparent record of fund receipt, transfer and use on the blockchain.
Blockchain in Gaming
Blockchain is a massive game-changer for gamers. A blockchain gaming platform lets every player in the game access their private ledger of all transactions and interactions between different parties. This feature helps prevent fraud, one of the most common challenges in modern-day gaming platforms.
It adds a layer of trust to digital transactions and makes it ideal for games where players share sensitive data or virtual assets. Using encryption systems such as Secure Messaging and Two-Factor Authentication, blockchain protects your user’s data from being tampered with or hacked.
In addition to verifying transactions, businesses can also use Blockchain to guarantee that no individual or party has been paid twice for the same service or digital assets rendered since each transaction is recorded.
Stamping Out Counterfeit Goods
According to a report by the EU’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, between $75 billion and $200 billion worth of counterfeit drugs are marketed yearly in the worldwide pharmaceuticals market. Fake components cost component manufacturers in the electronics sector around $100 billion a year. And in the European luxury goods market, nearly 10% of all items for sale are fakes, amounting to a loss in value of about $28 billion.
Counterfeit and pirated products are the results of an entire ecosystem of crime elements that constitute a threat to the financial and physical safety of those who use them. Counterfeit and pirated goods undermine market transparency and offer a direct monetary incentive to engage in criminal activity.
By harnessing the power of blockchain and smart tags, users can verify the identification and authenticity of each item they purchase. Smart tags are tiny encrypted chips that contain information about their manufacturer, store location, serial number, expiration date, and other information that identifies every unit produced.
Blockchain in the Advertising Sector
The blockchain-based advertising model is a natural fit for the emerging trend of micropayments for content consumption. The use of cryptocurrency removes both the friction and middleman from the ad buying process, making it easier for users to purchase.
The use of blockchain could help solve ownership and copyright problems for content, a favorite with younger generations. By allowing users to pay a micro-payment for content instead of a library of content, this model is more likely to facilitate the micropayment model favored by younger generations who want to avoid paying for what they consume. Ad-funded models can also exist, with end users responsible for how much data they want to share and receiving both the content and some of the data fee (as cryptocurrency) in return.
Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain
Blockchain can mitigate threats in the supply chain by introducing new levels of security and transparency into every transaction. In this way, blockchain can provide additional protection against illegal actors looking to exploit weaknesses in an otherwise robust supply chain.
Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the supply chain in three key ways:
- It’s an immutable public record of transactions, so it can verify where and when something was moved from one place to another.
- Because it’s shared across all its partners, it’s more secure than one company’s database.
- It can help make the entire process more efficient by eliminating redundant data entry and manual reconciliation processes.
Blockchain is already helping food and drink companies improve their supply chains. The industry has been the victim of several incidents in recent years, from E. Coli and salmonella to meat cross-contamination.
Using a decentralized ledger to record, store and track data means companies can monitor the food supply chain in unprecedented ways and trace any potential contamination back to its source. This can help food processing companies avoid sending tainted goods to distributors, allow food retailers to reduce or respond faster to product recalls, and ultimately reassure consumers that the food they have bought is safe to eat.
Fighting Identity Fraud
Blockchain technology means that identity theft is almost impossible. With the blockchain structure, only authorized participants can see the actual data, and only certain parties can handle the verification of transactions to be made. Personal data is safe, and the risk of identity fraud is very low because of the secure infrastructure of blockchain.
Gun Tracking
Blockchain can help fight gun violence by providing a system through which we can track and trace gun ownership. This technology does not imply any change in gun ownership laws that prevent people from purchasing or even owning a weapon without a proper ID or a background check.
However, the idea of using blockchain to log the origin of weapons is a new use for this technology. It impacts the number of guns on the market in some way and how gangs and violent actors at large obtain their weaponry.
In a Nutshell
The billions of data points collected daily by corporations and governments worldwide are information assets that must be analyzed and managed to extract the highest value from them. Blockchain promises to upgrade the global data infrastructure by building error-resistant data chains and empowering peer-to-peer exchange.
While the integrity of their data relies on human inputs and may be susceptible to mistakes, blockchain solutions outperform legacy systems in efficiency, particularly with sensitive data. With blockchain, institutions can confront twenty-first-century challenges and get the most out of diminishing resources.
