Blockchain can help find a cure for COVID-19 and rebuild the economy. Â
The effect of COVID-19 is relentlessly expanding across the world without any vaccine. It has already impacted all walks of life and every aspect of business and economic activity. Many governments are struggling to address this uncertain time and planning to reopen the economy once again. The race towards finding a coronavirus vaccine is on the rise as a large number of healthcare organizations are working around the clock to their response to the pandemic. In the time of crisis induced by the COVID-19 outbreak, blockchain is proven to be an effective technique.
Undeniably, this distributed ledger technology has much evolved and increasingly become popular over the last few years. Now the technology is playing a key role in the pandemic by helping pharmaceutical firms to develop drugs. There is no clandestine that blockchain has the potential to establish an efficient and transparent transaction and generate new coins. Apart from this, it is a crucial tool for instituting an efficient and transparent healthcare business model with higher degrees of precision and trust as this tech is a tamper-proof public ledger.
How Blockchain Can Help Fight Against the Pandemic?
By leveraging blockchain platforms, governments and authorities can monitor pandemic material distribution, donations, relief distribution and other responses quicker without any intrusion of user data. It can also be used as a digital identity that can help combat COVID-19. On the other side, companies can work together using the platforms that will help research the best way to fight against the pandemic.
Moreover, tracking a large population of infectious patients to prevent epidemics is a huge challenge. This is where blockchain has a role to play, enabling contact-tracing applications to track people infected with COVID-19 disease. This is also able to bring reliability, transparency, and security to medical data. While the pandemic is producing a vast number of data points, the traceability aspect of blockchain offers many compelling use cases, specifically in the ability to have a single point of truth to track and monitor medications, donations and medical supplies.
Blockchain is also effective in payment transactions as companies through a blockchain-based decentralized payment method, or cryptocurrencies, can receive payment without the risk of getting exposed to the virus through cash.
Significantly, COVID-19 has wreaked havoc global supply chain networks and raised severe concerns regarding the future of commerce. However, this presents an opportunity for the integration of blockchain and to make supply chains resilient, the implementation of this technology can be an effective approach.
For example, in the scenario where companies are increasingly faced with demands for more transparency from their customers as they want proof of their product’s source and the treatment of foods, blockchain is a significant tool. In order to rebuild rattled supply chain networks, the distributed ledger technology can offer the building blocks to deliver trading partners and consumers the transparency of trusted and secured data. It can also give the ability to synchronize processes through a mutually agreed ruleset.
Comprehensively, using blockchain technologies and platforms in the response to the COVID-19 crisis can play a vital role by increasing information transmission, enabling smooth transactions and delivering secured ledger technology, among others.