[ad_1]
On November 9, pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer announced that its COVID-19 vaccine is over 90% effective, and although it may be premature to herald the end of the pandemic – as the virus continues to rage in the United States and Europe – one time can speculate less: where will blockchain adoption be when the crisis subsides?
Some have predicted, after all, that the global health care upheaval could provide a perfect storm for blockchain adoption across the globe. An April Harvard Business Review article titled “How the Pandemic Is Pushing Blockchain Forward,” for example, notes:
“The virus has revealed the weaknesses of our supply chains, our inability to distribute resources where they are most needed to tackle the pandemic. […] The blockchain solutions that have been in development for years have been revived and released to address these challenges. ”
Will decentralization continue?
The world was moving towards a more decentralized economic structure even before the coronavirus pandemic, but the crisis – with its shortage of reliable masks, ventilators and drugs; travel bans and teleworking protocols; contact tracing initiatives, etc. – probably accelerated the process, and this should continue after the pandemic has ended.
A survey of 12,500 Americans conducted between May and October, for example, finds that “20% of all full work days will be provided from home after the end of the pandemic,” compared to just 5% before the COVID-19 cataclysm. Working from home “will stay,” according to the researchers, because the stigma associated with remote working has vanished, it saves commuting time and many employees enjoy it a lot, at least for part of the working week.
“This [decentralization] the trend will continue after the pandemic, “Philipp Sandner, head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, told Cointelegraph, adding:” The current pandemic situation has shown us how valuable and efficient it can be. decentralization, allowing us to increase our resilience to unforeseen events and, at the same time, often improve operational efficiency. “
In April, Ariel Zetlin-Jones, an associate professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, told Cointelegraph that the pandemic had brought home some difficult lessons, mainly that addiction is a weakness: “We will need to a more robust economy – one where supply chains are less dependent on a single manufacturer, where workers are less dependent on the operations of a single company, where individuals are less dependent on a single source of health care “. In short, a more decentralized world economy was needed and blockchain technology seemed poised to play a role uniquely.
Following Cointelegraph on the current situation, Zetlin-Jones said he expects even more decentralization after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I expect many sectors of the economy to continue looking for ways to better diversify against global shocks such as a pandemic.” He added: “It remains to be seen whether this diversification occurs through decentralization or a few centralized actors increasing their level of diversification.” Furthermore, according to him, the blockchain can play a role in all of this:
“To the extent that blockchain offers a way to achieve this diversification by decentralizing the application of a shared database or ledger, I remain optimistic that it will play a role in the economy in the future.”
Others are more ambivalent. Hanna Halaburda, an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told Cointelegraph that “Blockchain didn’t deliver as much as hoped” during the pandemic. “It largely failed as a contact-tracing solution: it was too slow, adoption was cumbersome, and it didn’t reach critical mass.” IBM’s blockchain-based COVID-19 tracking solution, for example, has failed, according to her. “The best contact tracking solutions weren’t blockchain-based,” he added.
However, technologies such as Zoom, the teleconferencing app that has become mandatory for many people working from home to use, skyrocketed during the crisis and this could have a spillover effect, making individuals and businesses more open to business. confrontation with new technologies, he admitted.
A role in acquiring health information?
In his recent book The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19, Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto, argues that blockchain technology could be used to check whether people have been tested for infection, as well as when or how they have been vaccinated against viruses. “I think governments are still struggling to determine that,” he told Cointelegraph. “The problem is that they rely on centralized databases. Will they be secure and scalable enough? It’s hard to say right now. “As Gans further pointed out for Cointelegraph:
“Blockchain technology reduces the cost of verification by being able to confirm that something has happened to many people. Post-pandemic could play a role in security as there is more remote work. But it could have a wider impact if it is used to reliably acquire health information, which is something we need most. “
Earlier this year, the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Germany began issuing vaccination certificates to individuals who had recovered from COVID-19, whose subsequent immunity could, “for example, allow them to be exempt from any (block-related) restrictions on their work, “according to Gerard Krause, the center’s epidemiologist. This is the type of project that could be made more effective if it were run on a blockchain platform, according to Gans.
Will the equipment be delivered and will it work?
Meanwhile, hospitals and governments attempting to purchase emergency equipment during the pandemic have sometimes been burned down. “Governments that have no experience buying protective equipment buy it from companies with which there is no business relationship,” noted a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher in a recent blog, adding: “Upon delivery, yes discovers that the products are defective or even counterfeit. ”
The Austrian Red Cross, for example, ordered 20 million breathing masks from a manufacturer in China, but the masks delivered were different from those ordered and many never arrived. A tamper-free, add-only distributed ledger could have ensured that goods were not traded in transit, suggests the MIT blog post.
“If there were persistent doubts about the value of blockchain platforms to improve the transparency of companies that depend on the seamless integration of disparate networks, COVID-19 has practically wiped them out,” wrote Mariam Obaid AlMuhairi, project manager of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. United Arab Emirates at the Dubai Future Foundation, in a World Economic Forum blog post in May. He added that the health crisis can be seen as a learning experience, demonstrating “how to build transparent, interoperable and connective networks”.
Blockchain projects are still limited in scope
However, the technology may still not be as versatile as some had hoped. In a recent study on the commercial uses of blockchain, Halaburda and his colleague Yannis Bakos looked at 150 “announced” blockchain projects. Only a small fraction of these (10% to 15%) had been implemented in March and of those executed, nearly all related to supply chain management, certification or payments, suggesting that the scope of commercial blockchain technology remains limited. .
Local supply chains got a big boost during the crisis, Halaburda acknowledged, but it’s also reasonable to expect that after the pandemic subsides, things could get closer to where they were before the crisis. Durable goods, for example, can still be produced in low-cost countries. Some of the benefits of localized manufacturing, such as not having to wait for personal protective equipment to arrive from thousands of miles away, could be forgotten in four or five years.
However, while blockchain has disappointed in some areas, such as contact tracing, it continues to offer powerful benefits – including transparency, interoperability and immutability – that could strengthen supply chains in future crises. The technology could be useful for shipping drugs from pharmaceutical companies to pandemic-ravaged regions, for example, or for making “movement permits” in blocked regions more viable, as the WEF blog post suggests.
Even Halaburda saw a silver lining in the present darkness. “The pandemic has forced companies to adopt more technology solutions and companies recognize the need to adopt new technologies, including blockchain,” he told Cointelegraph.
