With around 25 years of experience in technology and real estate, Darshana has broken quite a few stereotypes about women in male-dominated businesses. She is the first woman to be elected on the executive committee of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI). She is also the Regional Chair for FIBREE (Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise)
Her varied roles in strategy, engineering, business development, sales, marketing, and company leadership with Fortune 500 companies in the US and UK have given her a strong global edge. She puts this to good use to help start-ups she invests in to scale up, drive profitability, and create sustainable business growth. She firmly believes that enterprise blockchain is the future and can help to solve real-world problems in identity management, sustainable supply chain, e-governance, and healthcare.
Digital transformation is driven by the need for disruption — either disrupting the incumbent and making way for the new, or augmenting the current for better results. CTO’s/CIO’s of corporates are emerging from a major consolidation initiative post the pandemic that focuses on cost-reduction and if there is one thing that will help us achieve that, it is technology. IT leaders around the world are re-prioritizing their digital journeys to find ways of trusting each other and the identities of people and processes online. With all stakeholders migrating online, there is an exigent demand for trust and transparency as businesses are increasingly being conducted on digital mediums. Blockchain as a technology, fulfils that demand for trust and transparency through immutability and its decentralized nature.
Every digital transformation initiative must have blockchain in the technology of choice. Touted to be in the top three technologies that will change the course of digital transformation, blockchain delivers value in being able to create trust amongst all stakeholders of a digital platform.
Forecasts suggest that global blockchain technology revenues will experience a massive growth in the coming years. Gartner states that blockchain technology will create more than $176 billion dollars’ worth of business value by 2025 and $3.1 trillion by 2030. Over the years, blockchain has matured as an enterprise solution technology but 2021 has in a way, fast-tracked this adoption because of the global health crisis that has shifted the world online.
Corporates have pursued Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and Minimum Viable Product (MVPs) to stay ahead of their competition in the digital transformation of enterprise solutions which are now transforming into large applications. Preferred Blockchain frameworks have success stories for enterprise application, as was seen when the Linux Foundation started the Hyper-ledger project and large technology companies like IBM, Intel, DTCC and blockchain start-up Consenys made their blockchain frameworks open source under the Hyper-ledger Project.
In the last two years, a variety of blockchain protocols have emerged that have resulted in successful blockchain implementation across business domains. For example, Ethereum, a decentralized software platform, brings the smart contract to blockchain. Ethereum’s enterprise alliance aids enterprise clients to build blockchains. Similar to this, many different protocols have emerged recently such as R3 Corda, Quorum and Ripple, that are spelling success in banking, financial and insurance services.
Managed blockchain platforms like IBM, Oracle and Amazon eliminate the heavy lifting involved in the setup of blockchain networks by reducing significant time —up to 60 percent sometimes — as well as maintenance efforts, making it easy to operate networks and easing integration with various applications.
The question is not WHETHER enterprises will adopt blockchain, but WHEN they will. Building robust, trusted digital business operations is critical to success for any business in the post-COVID world. Small, medium and large enterprises’ response to a digital transformation that enables trust will define their market leadership and bottom lines in 2021 and beyond.
The key domains that have seen the benefits of implementing blockchain technology are:
Financial Services – Trade Finance and Payment Settlement
E-Governance – VC and Identity Management
Sustainable Supply Chain – Traceability, Authentication and Carbon Emission Tracking
Insurance – Claims and Settlement, Policy Administration, Universal Identity
HealthCare – Citizen immunity Passport, EHR Records
Media – Digital Rights
Needless to say, not all problems can be solved by blockchain. Corporates need to go through a workshop to understand and assess whether blockchain is the right technology for them and one that suits their particular requirements. Companies that provide blockchain solutions should be able to consult and guide their clients with a sharp clarity.
Some of our clients using the Internet of Things (IoT) for Track ‘n’ Trace are exploring blockchain. The technology behind sensors and smart chips is evolving rapidly, making them increasingly portable and applicable for real-time interactions with blockchain ledgers. The combination of blockchain and IoT has a huge potential for the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and gives companies the opportunity to create value from collected data. The growing number of emerging blockchain protocols, partnerships and IoT device providers already indicates that blockchain is a good fit in the IoT sector.
Europe has already defined an EU strategy on blockchain to build a pan-European blockchain infrastructure. Japan, China have done the same while India has also defined a National Blockchain Strategy. Around half of the Indian states are exploring e-governance solutions using blockchain.
In a post-COVID world, the growth of companies has been fueled by innovative business models that incorporate aggressive strategy to meet and exceed customer expectations online. A technology transformation which arrests fraudulent online behaviors to instill trust between networks and stakeholders is going to be the technology of choice going forward.