Blockchain helps organizations do exciting things — one of those things is the creation of trust and transparency controls that support the needs of the customer and end-user.
“Trust and transparency are what make blockchain work,” said EY’s Global Blockchain Innovation Leader Paul Brody at the Blockchain Summit in Singapore late last year. His words echoed at the event, with several business leaders emphasizing on the importance of trust and transparency in new applications of the technology.
Take the pharmaceutical industry for example. According to a study by DHL and Accenture, blockchain technology can now be used to combat counterfeit drugs and false medications across the globe.
Counterfeit pharmaceuticals are US$200 billion business annually, according to PwC. Even in the most secure markets in the world, it’s estimated that at least 1 percent of all drugs in circulation are counterfeit.
In fact, in many developing and underdeveloped countries in the world, there’s a major trust issue when it comes to medicines.
To answer this challenge, DHL and Accenture are driving a blockchain-based serialization project providing sophisticated track-and-trace capabilities to the pharmaceutical industry. The collaboration resulted in a proof-of-concept that used blockchain technology for product verification.
According to the companies, the prototype was a lab performance simulation that demonstrated how blockchain technology could handle volumes of more than 7 billion unique pharmaceutical serial numbers and over 1,500 transactions per second.
The project illustrated how blockchain can be used to capture all logistics activities relating to an item of medication – from production to purchase – and ensure this information is made secure, transparent, and immediately available.
The fact is, whether you think of enterprises or governments, blockchain is most useful because it offers an element of trust and transparency over other efficiencies and benefits. That’s where business leaders just starting to dabble with the technology should focus their efforts as well.