It will change the way we take care of ourselves and buy our homes, it will be capable of protecting the copyright of our images and disrupting financial brokerage processes and pension products: blockchain technology is the most recent and veritable protagonist of the ongoing digital revolution.

To understand the impact that this system could have on our daily lives, it is sufficient to consider the widespread and high-level interest it has already generated: indeed, the Bank of Italy has monitored this phenomenon for a few years now and it affirms that blockchain is potentially capable of ensuring as much reliability as centrally managed public registers.

The Vice President of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, has expressed his hope that Europe “will embrace the opportunities of blockchain” and promised that he will soon meet with “key authorities and the private sector to evaluate the long-term situation beyond current trends”.

Therefore, let’s look in detail at the main areas destined to be disrupted by this protocol, which has become well known as it underlies the functioning of cryptocurrencies – bitcoin first and foremost – and is constructed as a “chain of blocks” acting as a certificate of trust on which contracts, networks and systems of transparent exchange can be built. According to CbInsights there are thirty sectors that could possibly use it, starting from banks and the markets.

Blockchain at the service of finance
The international market authorities have started to carefully monitor and study the potential of blockchain, as banks and companies have already been doing, in addition to the Italian Parliament, in which the Chamber of Deputies’ Finance commission launched an investigation on technological finance in mid-September.

According to the Bank of Italy, the term blockchain refers to “a process in which a set of parties shares IT resources in order to construct and update a virtual database (the blockchain) which is public (everyone can see it) as well as decentralised (every participant has a copy of the data)”. In other words, it is a sort of public general ledger which is automatically updated on each of the nodes participating in the network and which should guarantee the digital identity of the party that authorised the exchanges. Its functioning is not guaranteed by a central entity; rather, each individual transaction is validated by interaction between all nodes.

Thanks to the use of this technology, the transfer of money and payments in general could become more secure and certified, faster and less costly”. All of this will take place with significant savings in terms of currency transfer costs, which currently amount to roughly Euro 30 billion per year.

The new life of insurance
Finance is not the only sector experiencing the blockchain revolution: the system could also improve how we protect our lives, starting from something as simple as motor liability insurance. With the support of Capgemini Italia’s Blockchain Distributed Ledger Technology centre, a group of insurance companies (consisting of Generali Global Corporate & Commercial Italia, Aig Italia and UnipolSai) and brokers (Aon and Willis Towers Watson) has created a platform for the secure and efficient distribution, sharing and synchronisation of risk data. This solution will make it possible to optimise negotiation and quotation timing, which could decline by up to 90%, based on the conditions in which customers are driving their vehicles.

The “chained” will and ID card
The “blockchain” could be a tool to protect highly sensitive documents which directly impact our personal lives, such as living wills and statements of patient wishes concerning the use of lifesaving measures.

The Medicalchain online platform records directly on the blockchain medical reports and all information about the health of the citizens who want to use it, while the company Spidchain works on finding solutions to provide digital identities (to be used to log in to various online portals) which are more secure in terms of privacy and also more portable, thanks to blockchain technology.

Notarial deeds become digital
The Italian Notaries, in collaboration with IBM, have developed the Notarchain database, a digital platform for commercial transactions in which Italian notaries, and not anonymous parties, will manage the content, guaranteeing the “certainty, control and unmodifiability” of everything entered. Anything that is bought and sold and that may have a value, and which also requires certainty, could end up in this project, from real estate to works of art.

Pirate-proof photography
Moveable assets and intellectual property alike find a considerable ally in this new technology. Kodak recently announced its collaboration with Wenn Digital to launch KODAKOne, a platform for the management of image rights based on blockchain. The two companies will also collaborate on KODAKCoin, a “photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.”