Any Industry With a Supply Chain--Including Mobility--Can Use Blockchain

Many industries with retail customers have extensive supply chains that can benefit from blockchain. But most industries have counterparty transactions (business to business) as part of a B2B2C value chain. 

Mobile roaming provides one example. Capacity swaps and wholesale provide other examples. 

source: ABI Research, IBM

Blockchain has many uses in the connectivity business, ranging from settlements to privacy to spam reduction to roaming payments. Unlike some public blockchain networks, telecom blockchain is more likely to use private blockchain where all the participants are verified in advance.  

Essentially, blockchain is designed for ecosystems, with multiple, decentralized sources of identity that mean every participant in the network has the ability to verify the correctness of transactions. 

 source: Deloitte

One thing should be obvious: using blockchain, ecosystem partners gain the ability to trade and transact with any member with less friction. Most of the time and effort required to create “trust” and avoid dangers such as fraud, billing errors, privacy breaches or non-payment are avoided. 

Information friction--increasing transaction cost and risk--can result from imperfect information.  Participants in a transaction may not have access to the same information, giving one party an unfair advantage. 

Another source of cost is that Information might be incorrect or inconsistent, leading to bad decisions or delays.

Also, some information is Inaccessible. That can produce more than friction and risk: it can lead to inability to fulfill an order. 

Finally, security risks increase friction, whether from hacking attacks and cybercrime to privacy concerns and identity theft. Those dangers might be more frequently a reality for retail customers, but even wholesale and business-to-business transactions can be affected. 

The other implication is that blockchain helps enable something resembling an e-commerce platform, allowing partners to complete transactions faster and with less danger of fraud or error. 

Think of this as one more example of the industry’s decades-long desire to create on-demand delivery mechanisms. Altogether, blockchain is one tool of several that connectivity providers will be using to reduce friction in the value chain, often boosting profits in the process.