If you’re here you may already be familiar with many of the benefits blockchain can bring to the world. From disrupting banks, providing immutable traceability and preventing fraud in a trust-less manner, there are numerous ways the blockchain can impact today’s systems employed by companies across the globe.
In the beginning, cryptocurrency set itself apart to disrupt every industry imaginable from banking, gaming, e-commerce, voting, logistics, etc. Now that things have settled down and the emerging technology has started to find its roots, the next step toward blockchain adoption has started to carve a space for itself in companies starting to offer Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS). There are many immediate and tangible benefits companies can get by adopting blockchain solutions, the only thing these companies need is the assistance from blockchain experts.
Let’s talk Solutions
Here are two solutions businesses can get from blockchain right now.
1. Reducing Tax Liability with Smart Contracts
If you’re a service that collects funds from one party and issues it to another, like a three-sided marketplace, then you’re likely familiar with the scenario where you have to take custody over some amount of funds and pay them out to the appropriate party in-order to settle the transaction that takes place between them.
Using Shutterstock as a real example, third parties use this platform to look for digital photos, videos or music to license and use in promoting their own business. These digital files are licensed by the content creators who upload them to the platform, and Shutterstock stands in the middle as the curator and custodian. When a middleman such as Shutterstock is to pay out proceeds to the content creator, that means at some point they were required to hold the funds in total, then pay out a cut to the content creator as well as keep the fees for themselves.
This is a pretty standard scenario, but what happens from an accounting side is that the company is taxed on the gross revenue for the purchase of a license, rather than just the net proceeds they received. What blockchain and smart contracts can do to alleviate that is remove Shutterstock’s need to be a custodian in the middle and programmatically release the appropriate amount of funds to both the content creator and the fees to be collected to Shutterstock, directly.
2. Reducing International Fees
Continuing the example with Shutterstock, imagine the hassle, fees and overhead required to pay their customers internationally to their own respective currencies. Blockchain makes that much simpler by the use of any popular stable coin such as Carbon, or Tether that is pegged to the US dollar. This eliminates the need for the company to maintain the same tax compliance for country for international contractors that’s required by converting the currency to their own native FIAT.
With the stable coin paid out directly to the user’s wallets, they are free to exchange that into their currency of choice, or the company may choose to work with exchanges and build that into their payout flow using smart contracts to automatically handle that for their users and provide a completely seamless user experience.
How can AIKON help?
AIKON is at the forefront of helping push the adoption of these sort of blockchain solutions by providing our own Blockchain-as-a-Service called the Open Rights Exchange. Many of the solutions we discussed above require user adoption on the blockchain and that’s where we are hoping to make an impact with our ORE ID service.
The major hurdle for both scenarios is that all parties are required to have access to the blockchain. This is where ORE ID steps in and eliminates the complicated process that a user must go through to setup and maintain their own blockchain accounts and keys, download a third party wallet to manage their keys and manage and blockchain resources for their accounts. Instead with ORE ID it’s as easy as logging into your existing Google, Facebook, any other social OAuth account or typical email sign up, and your user has their own individual blockchain account.
As you can see, we’re really making the effort to bridge the existing web infrastructure with the latest and cutting edge blockchain technologies of tomorrow.
If you or your company isn’t already considering blockchain solutions to enhance their business, we hope you walk away with some insights and we’re happy to talk about any solutions, ideas or partnerships in our Telegram channel. You can also find out more about using ORE ID here.
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