Examples of Businesses Incorporating Blockchain Into Their Business Model

• Future blockchain technologies in the manufacturing industry, such as Moog’s VeriPart, enable increased security and resilience features to boost trust in 3D-printed parts. Blockchain is being used by companies like Nestle, Walmart, and Unilever to detect and eradicate the cause of foodborne diseases in the supply chain. One early example of blockchain in the food supply chain is Walmart’s innovative use of blockchain to track the provenance and integrity of pork products originating from China. Due to blockchain’s success in the supply chain, Walmart now demands all of its spinach and lettuce suppliers to utilize it.
• Big brands are jumping into the game, with Pringles, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut all releasing their own NFTs. Last year Visa paid $150,000 for an NFT, while Adidas paid another $156,000 for a digital piece of art. Adidas, also, sold over $22 million of their NFT line in order to increase ecosystem involvement among its brand fans.
• While the benefits and drawbacks of stablecoins are debated, their popularity is undeniable. Coins worth more than $113 billion have already been issued. The question that begs is what should be done about them, and who should be held accountable. Stablecoins may be a logical progression of the blend of public and private money that we have relied on for generations, predicated on responses that range from claiming that the current system is OK to boosting CBDC research. Due to the advent of DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies), new types of money, such as stablecoins, and other sorts of financial instruments like decentralized finance, have flourished. If DLT platforms are the future’s transfer mechanism, it appears worthwhile to determine the best money that can be utilized on that mechanism. Tokenized deposits, it has been proposed, could be a promising option to follow.
• Financial applications involving the ability to “tokenize” financial (e.g. securities, commodities) and non-financial (e.g. real estate) assets may have a beneficial effect on SMEs’ access to capital by augmenting inclusion in markets that were hitherto limited to larger or institutional investors (e.g. tokenization of SMEs’ equity or debt).

The Business of Logistics

While the current media spotlight on Global Supply Chains (GSCs) is new, they are far from novelty as a study area. GSC studies* have been a prime strand in political economy for well over a quarter-century, allowing us to understand how modern global trade is constituted and managed. Indeed, GSCs already account for around 70% of all international trade, making them the hallmark component of the twenty-first century.

Smart contracts are essentially programs that run when certain criteria are satisfied and are maintained on a blockchain. They’re usually used to automate the performance of an accord so that all parties can be certain of the conclusion right away, without the need for any intermediaries or time-wasting. They can also automate a workflow, starting the following step when certain circumstances are satisfied. Smart contracts are particularly beneficial in the supply chain for distributing payments, documenting ledger entries, and indicating necessity for human input.

The fundamental modification of business models and business processes along the supply chain is one of the difficult tasks for sustainable supply chain management. All parties directly or indirectly involved in the design, production, storage, distribution, sales, finance, and use of a single product are included in supply chains. As such, complex worldwide economic and social networks result from this holistic approach to collaborative value creation and delivery. All of the “relationships” throughout a supply chain are affected by the use of smart contracts.

NFTs and Big Business

Global brands have considered NFTs to be part of their business models. Within this integration of NFTs and digital assets, utility and marketing are pillar elements of what would be considered a successful project. Nonetheless, the NFT market seems to be cooling off from its hype- precipitating the opportunity for the rise of utility-based projects and unique marketing executions. A balance between each of these variables, it appears, is what constitutes a strong NFT project. Companies like Mercedes and Lamborghini steered into the NFT space in a campaign to reimagine their product lines. Adidas sold over $22 million of their NFT collection. Even more traditional firms like Budweiser are into NFTs, having launched their Heritage Collection last year, an array of 1,936 unique cans to represent the year the first Budweiser can was created, 1936.

Undoubtedly, the adoption of cryptocurrency expanded in 2021 as major players signed into the industry, including countries such El Salvador, and now Ukraine, galvanized by internal situations. With studies by governments regarding the deployment of CBDCs and the regulation of the digital assets sector, the promise, the hope, and the function of digital assets presents avenues for business to develop ecosystem-readiness using Blockchain Adoption Models (BAMs). Case in point, Visa did a survey in which they revealed that 25% of businesses they studied in 9 countries plan to incorporate cryptocurrency as a form of payment; 13% of consumers predict that most retailers would begin using cryptocurrency for settlement purposes. 

Show Me The Money

The initial thesis of blockchain was to move money from point X to point Y without the need for a central authority. Over the course of unfolding history, Blockchains have improved, facilitating considerably speedier and less expensive transactions. In collaboration with the Global Blockchain Business Council, Heidrick & Struggles, a leading provider of global leadership consulting and on-demand recruiting solutions, released a research titled From Financial Services to Blockchain and Crypto: How Executives Are Making the Switch.

This research looked into how executives are transitioning from traditional financial services institutions to blockchain and crypto firms, as well as what they should know before making the switch. Some of the significant findings include: nearly 50 percent of respondents (49%) came from investment banking, where they occupied prominent positions such as senior vice presidents (33%) or managing directors (28 percent ). Almost a third of those polled indicated they quit their previous job to start their own business (31 percent ). The fact that so many executives are prepared to take a chance on a new startup demonstrates the importance of blockchain in industry. Another noteworthy result is that 43% of respondents stated their businesses are in the start-up stage, while another 23% said they are in the growth stage. Companies like PayPal, Fidelity, Square have backed cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) publicly and executed business models to include digital assets. According to PYMNTS’ recent data, 58 percent of multinational corporations use at least one kind of cryptocurrency, and these corporations are considerably more likely to employ cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology for transactional purposes than for investment objectives. Additionally, in consonance with The Cryptocurrency Payments Opportunity, a PYMNTS and i2c Inc. initiative, 40 percent of enterprises in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East aim to use digital assets to make purchases within the next year. Stablecoins will prove to be a basic building-block of international finance. They will pave the way for future innovations and paradigm shifts. As per data from Block , the entire quantity of stablecoins is now above $173 billion, up from $6 billion just two years ago. This crypto asset class will likely dominate both established and fledgling markets in the foreseeable future if supply growth curves follow a similar pattern. It’s no wonder that businesses and government bodies are following suit.

We can clearly see that there is a realignment in the financial industry. Businesses in the financial industry can restructure around blockchain and its consequent digital assets to stay ahead of the curve.

Therefore, if industries are using these transformational technologies to better serve their customers, how are they following the masses into the metaverse, and why are they doing so?

Into the Metaverse and Beyond

Several top-tier tech firms, including Meta (Facebook), Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Shopify, to name a few have got a few things in common, but one thing stands out. First, they are all worth a lot. Second, they have benefited a lot from digital ecosystems whose importance was emphasized during the pandemic. And now. They are all invested in what Neal Stephenson’s called the “Metaverse”. Meta, for instance, has made a $10 billion bet for the development of its Metaverse objectives in a bid to dominate the space in the next decade (a Web2 mindset, by the way!). Microsoft, on the other hand, placed its bet on the Metaverse by its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company behind sensational games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft for a thumping amount of almost $70 billion. Before the deal goes through in 2023, Microsoft is meant to solidify its Metaverse play. Nvidia calls its Metaverse the “Omniverse” and it includes its work in artificial intelligence.

The future metaverse could potentially play a significant role in the evolution of the virtual economy, which is based on video games and virtual worlds with little disturbances. Consequently, both users and creators benefit greatly, and this benefit can be amplified if non-fungible tokens are included into in-game assets, enabling the decentralization of the virtual economy. In 2021, Bloomberg Intelligence noted that the Metaverse presented an $800 billion opportunity by 2024. Grayscale believes it to be $1 trillion dollars, however, its report did not give a timeline.

Various industries are embracing this concept, especially the fashion and real estate industries starting projects using Sandbox, Decentraland, and Axie Infinity. The Metaverse land grab went up by 700% in 2021. Republic Realm, which spent $4.3 million on land in The Sandbox, and Tokens.com, which spent $2.4 million on Decentraland, have made the largest deals in the Metaverse.

At the end of the day, the user is the most critical aspect of the Metaverse. Thus, the use of open-source blockchains such as the XRPL and rapidly growing community-based projects like onXRP will be essential in educating the user, but also advocating for Metaverse diplomacy to preclude the nascence of an oligarchic Metaverse.

Conclusion

Research shows that blockchain technologies have the power to transform and challenge established business models as well as generate whole new ones. Current blockchain research focuses solely on technology features and their application in practice. There is a paucity of empirical investigations and research that does not explain the prospective impact of blockchain technology on company models. Wherefore, there is still a gap between future business value and actual business utility produced in praxis.