Home » future

(Originally published on LinkedIn by Shamsh Hadi, CEO and Co-Founder of ZorroSign)

Blockchain advocates have long been excited about distributed ledger technology’s potential for cybersecurity, financial services (especially cross-border payments), the Internet of Things (IoT), real estate, and supply chain management. But as we look ahead to 2023, some other interesting markets are worth watching for the latest trends in blockchain use. Here are four industries I believe will accelerate blockchain adoption to their great advantage . . .

Cloud Services

The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) generated $408.6 billion in 2021 revenues, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). Big Tech players “Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have together invested almost $120 billion in the past 12 months,” calculates as recent article in The Economist. “Most of it in data centres and the servers that power them.”

While the cloud services industry is still young, this tremendous growth (and high profit margins) drive innovation. Such innovation will include more blockchain technology in 2023.

For example, “cloud storage is another sector that blockchain can electrify and change. Traditionally, cloud storage companies allow users to purchase a certain amount of storage that is generally sold by the terabyte,” explains a recent Investment Bank article. “Blockchain technology provides users a means to store information on a peer-to-peer network. A cloud storage platform could be run by the nodes that help facilitate transactions. The nodes would be giving up storage on their computers to the consumer, but the node owners would be compensated by the consumers for storing their data.”

More broadly for cloud services, blockchain brings greater privacy and security capabilities. “When cloud computing is integrated with blockchain technology, the main problem, security and privacy, gets addressed,” writes Tanvir Zafar for Yahoo! Finance. “Data deletion from one computer does not erase data stored on other devices on a blockchain network. As a result, there is no danger of data loss or alteration. Data on a blockchain is irremovable. It allows for clear documentation of data usage, including where, when, and how it is being used and by whom. Blockchains are governed by codes, eliminating the need for third-party rules, making them a more secure alternative.”

Such elevated privacy, security, and automation can quickly advance cloud computing—not only delivering greater benefits to consumers, but potentially lowering costs and overhead for providers.

Beyond these improvements to today’s cloud services, blockchain can be added as a service offering itself. “In blockchain-based cloud computing, blockchain can be used for secure network management by hosting the blockchain network as Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) in a cloud environment,” suggests Kenny Kleinerman for Ridge. “BaaS supports IoT applications by offering different blockchain-enabled services, such as smart contract services, verification services on user transactions, and cloud blockchain storage.”

I foresee blockchain as a huge piece of cloud services—both infrastructure and offering—in the years ahead!

Government

At ZorroSign, we have already seen many government agencies, departments, and ministries adopting blockchain for operations. “Governments are likely to begin implementing distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems that will replace traditional paper-based systems,” writes Finnegan Pierson for Chetu. “The migration to digital data systems has been going on for quite some time, but DLT has greater advantages that provide greater trust, transparency and security via encryption and validation features.”

Government organizations can readily improve constituent communications and administration with the innovative adoption of blockchains.  For example, blockchain can improve:

  • Form processing and chain-of-custody tracking of government documents
  • Identification and elimination of errors in government documents, plus reduce tampering and detect forgery
  • Operational efficiency by eliminating paper-based records (and related equipment and supplies to print, copy, distribute, and store paper documents)
  • Cost controls by reducing the expense of manually processing applications, forms, and documentation of all kinds and instead implementing digital records stored on blockchain

In the UAE, for example, H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Digital City Vision for Smart Dubai has been a guiding principle for ZorroSign and other blockchain innovators. For ZorroSign, we share his goal of a paperless life in the UAE by 2030, but Digital Dubai pursues many technologies, as the leaders have found “government effectiveness became increasingly imperative especially in Government to Consumer (G2C) and Government to Government (G2G) services.”

Specific to blockchain, “The Dubai Blockchain strategy will usher in economic opportunity for all sectors in the city, and cement Dubai’s reputation as a global technology leader,” notes the Digital Dubai initiative. “In line with Digital Dubai’s mandate to become a global leader in the smart economy, fueling entrepreneurship and global competitiveness.” Such vision for government is starting in Dubai, but readily seen as critical to future governance in other countries.

Perhaps most exciting, “blockchain technology can end voter fraud,” claims Shivam Arora in an article for Simplilearn. How? With blockchain “people can vote online easily without revealing their identities. Using blockchain, officials can count votes with absolute accuracy, knowing that each ID can be attributed to only one vote. Fraud cannot occur because it is next to impossible with blockchain technology. And, once a vote is added to a ledger, it cannot be changed or erased.” The opportunity to improve voting processes and ensure democratic results will surely keep blockchain in the government focus for years to come.

Law

As blockchain transforms government, so it will transform the law and legal services.

There are many ways blockchain technology is already transforming legal services, writes Steve Glaveski for the NewLaw Academy: “Smart contracts, dispute resolution, IP rights… where The blockchain can support evidence of creation, first use, and rights management, and can track distribution. This ultimately prevents copyright infringement and enforces mitigation via time-stamped copies of work, aiding plaintiffs if appearing before a court. Land and property registries (that today) are notorious for being out of date, decentralized, and restricted. And public service records.”

Again, at ZorroSign we have seen law firms and legal departments start with digital signatures for digital transactions, then quickly expand their use of blockchain to store, track, and manage their contracts and agreements. Contract lifecycle management (or CLM) solutions help attorneys to manage the complex and evolving nature of contracts—making them more efficient at producing, executing, and upholding contractual agreements. Leveraging blockchain, ZorroSign manages contracts as we manage all digital documents, providing digital signatures to quickly execute legally binding contracts, a patented Z-Forensics token to ensure contract immutability, and a document management system built on blockchain for immutable storage.

Consensys, a software foundry providing decentralized software services and apps on Ethereum, believes blockchain can make the legal industry more accessible and more transparent. “Lawyers can leverage blockchain technology to streamline and simplify their transactional work, digitally sign and immutably store legal agreements,” claims a Consensys article. And “blockchain-based contracts have baked-in compliance, no surprises, and no room for misinterpretation.”

As transactions and records move to digital workflows, digital signing ceremonies, and digital storage, blockchain will be a boon to law firms and legal department in 2023 and beyond.

Identity

Finally, with the move to digital commerce and communications, our individual identity—as mapped to digital worlds—becomes increasingly important to control and authenticate.

“Identity systems are currently flawed in a number of ways. They are porous, operate in isolation and prone to error,” adds Finnegan Pierson again in Chetu. “Blockchain systems can solve these problems and provide a single source to verify identity and assets. Blockchain identity can also offer a type of ‘self-sovereignty’ that hasn’t existed before.”

This desire for control over one’s personal information—and digital data across platforms—lies at the heart of web3. While web3 starts with blockchain, its ambition and scope will spread far across the Internet, metaverses, and shared networks.

“Identification and credentials are easier for everyone to work with when they’re digital: vaccination cards, academic qualifications, occupational licenses, employee ID and more. But this highly personal information must remain private and secure,” says IBM. “Governments, businesses and educational institutions are turning to blockchain as a proven way to enable a secure and trusted infrastructure and improve services.”

“One of the most problematic results of the internet age has been identity security,” notes Nathan Reiff for Investopedia. “Blockchain technology has already demonstrated the potential for transforming the way that online identity management takes place. The applications for blockchain and identity management are wide-ranging.”

From cloud services, cybersecurity, and IT to financial services, government, healthcare, legal services, real estate, supply chains, and other industries, blockchain is changing how we do business, share information, and identify ourselves.

These trends are just the start, however, and the opportunities for blockchain to improve the privacy and security of our digital data will flourish in the years ahead.

Contact us to learn more . . . or start a free trial to put our blockchain software for digital signatures to the test!

What is Web 3.0?

You may have heard about Web 3.0 (or web3) recently and wondered, what is Web 3.0 and how is it different from Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

A broad definition of Web 1.0 is simply the initial iteration of the World Wide Web in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.  “Web 1.0 is the term used for the earliest version of the Internet as it emerged from its origins with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),” writes Kuntal Chakraborty for Techopedia. “Experts refer to it as the ‘read-only’ web—a web that was not interactive in any significant sense.”

From those early static web pages, a platform model of computing soon evolved that would become Web 2.0 or the ‘social web.’  Here, interaction with growing web applications and platforms drove e-commerce and the expansion of the Internet, allowing large providers to aggregate and control much of the shared data.  This is the Internet we know today.

“Web 2.0’s business model relies on user participation to create fresh content and profile data to be sold to third parties for marketing purposes,” writes Charles Silver in a recent Forbes article. “Indeed, the internet has become a massive app store, dominated by centralized apps from Google, Facebook and Amazon, where everyone is trying to build an audience, collect data and monetize that data through targeted advertising.  In my opinion, the centralization and exploitation of data, and the use of it without users’ meaningful consent, is built into Web 2.0’s business model.”

The dream of Web 3.0, however, is to break the centralization of information and democratize the Internet more to the vision of its earliest founders.  “Web3, ” claims Chris Dixon from Andreesen Horowitz in a recent article in The Economist, “combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of web2.”

The Web 3.0 “will be based on the convergence of emerging technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and augmented reality,” note Neeti Aggarwal and Dandreb Salangsang in The Asian Banker.  “It will be characterized by decentralized data, a more transparent and secure environment, machine cognitive intelligence and  three-dimensional design.”

“The rise of technologies such as distributed ledgers and storage on blockchain will allow for data decentralization and create a transparent and secure environment, overtaking Web 2.0’s centralization, surveillance and exploitative advertising,” continues Silver.  “Indeed, one of the most significant implications of decentralization and blockchain technology is in the area of data ownership and compensation… Web 3.0 will bring us a fairer internet by enabling the individual to be a sovereign.”

Web 3.0 isn’t just championed by iconoclasts and trustbusters—Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai, recently shared on a quarterly earnings call, “On Web3, we are definitely looking at blockchain, and such an interesting and powerful technology with broad applications so much broader again than any one application. So as a company, we are looking at how we might contribute to the ecosystem and add value.”

As such, even the biggest players in Web 2.0 are looking to adopt Web 3.0 technologies and strategies as they continue their evolution.

Financial Services on Web 3.0

“Think about all the financial instruments we use today—currency, loans, insurance, bonds, credit cards, stocks, futures, options, interest bearing accounts—being converted to a new model,” asks Thomson Reuters.  “One that doesn’t require a traditional banking institution.”

For financial service organizations, adopting emerging technologies has historically been a slow, prove-it-before-you-move-it endeavor.  With the boom in fintech the past ten years, however, financial service organizations from accounting firms, to banks, credit unions, and credit-card companies, to finance companies and managers, insurance companies, investment funds, notaries, payment providers, stock brokerages, and conglomerates have all moved faster to adopt new technologies and gain a competitive advantage in serving customers.

“Fintech refers to the latest software developments in the financial services sector,” explains a recent Finextra article.  “Using technologies such as artificial intelligence, biometrics, payments, crypto and others, banks are increasingly able to offer their customers more convenient, streamlined services.”

With Web 3.0, however, it may be a case of many financial institutions pushed into new technologies by customers, rather than pulled in the hunt for larger margins and higher profits, as what sets web3 apart from web2 is ownership and control of data.

Already, “a few banks are using blockchain to power real-time transactions,” writes Emily McCormick for Bank Director.  Meanwhile, “Fintechs competing with banks are also taking advantage of the disintermediation trends promised by a Web3 economy.”

Today, cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms challenge traditional banking for services and control of consumer monetary systems.  But while cryptocurrencies provide an exciting alternative to the constraints of fractional-reserve banking, financial services providers need not abandon central bank currencies to adopt Web 3.0 strategies.  The distributed ledger technology of blockchains can also support financial service applications above-and-beyond cryptocurrencies.

Future Technologies for Financial Services

As most financial service providers engage Web 2.0 technologies, the opportunity for early adopters to leap ahead to Web 3.0 becomes clear. 

“Over the next decade, we believe blockchain will become the dominant operating infrastructure of the financial system and look forward to helping our network of regulated banks, brokers and fintechs develop the competency and dexterity to be early adopters of this transformational technology,” said Ryan Zacharia, general partner at JAM Special Opportunity Ventures (JSOV), an affiliate of Jacobs Asset Management (JAM) and FINTOP Capital.

“Unlike the cryptocurrency market, for example—which is built on a digitally native system—Vikram Pandit, CEO of The Orogen Group and former Citigroup Inc. CEO, said that innovations in the traditional banking sector are based on applying new technology to improve old architecture, citing the use of distributed ledger technology in cross-border payments as an example,” notes a recent S&P Global Market Intelligence report.

Payments are another area ready for Web 3.0 transformation.  “In the past, when you transferred money to someone online, you needed a trusted service like PayPal or a bank to make the transfer,” cites an Algorand post.  “With blockchain networks, you can now transfer money directly to anyone with an Internet connection on a peer-to-peer basis.”

Further, securing digital transactions and the digital chain-of-custody are critical for financial organizations.  Even as some financial assets move to the metaverse—NFTs are an early example—a technology that immutably tracks and reports the provenance of assets is necessary to ensure ownership and enforce agreements across transactions and holdings. 

“Issues of trust, transparency, privacy, and user control lie at the heart of Web 3.0,” writes MakerDAO, and “on the back of the blockchain promises to shift the balance of power back in favor of the user.”

Blockchain, built for zero-trust environments, is the ideal architecture for tracking and storing digital transactions and documentation, and another way Web 3.0 technologies support evolving financial services.

ZorroSign and Web 3.0

And here is where ZorroSign shines!  We have built our digital platform from the ground up using blockchain technology.  Launched with Hyperledger Fabric, our multi-chain platform now supports the public Provenance Blockchain as well, giving our users an entirely new world of decentralized digital transactions.

At ZorroSign, we deliver digital signature solutions built on blockchain for greater privacy and security. 

Our Web 3.0 technology platform also provides identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) capabilities through a patented Z-Forensics token plus fraud prevention, user authentication, and document verification.  Web 3.0 features such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) allow us to automate form completion for digital documents, and can improve regulatory compliance across global standards for legally enforceable digital signatures.

Paired with Provenance Blockchain—which reduces the need for third-party intermediation, drastically reducing costs and freeing up capital in financial transactions—ZorroSign’s platform promotes greater transparency and liquidity for financial service organizations, and allows for new kinds of financial engineering and business opportunities.

To learn more about Web 3.0 and how ZorroSign can help your financial service organization meet the future needs of your customers, contact us today!