Top 5 Blockchain Trends in 2021 and Prominent Use Cases in Supply Chain and Logistics Industry

The Covid-19 pandemic put the global supply chains at test and exposed their fragility. Consequently, we are seeing a rush towards digitization with emerging technologies to play a sterling role by enabling force for economic, business and social transformation.

With the power of transparency, providing a single truth to all members of its network, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has the potential to disrupt business models and business processes and more.

Blockchain or DTL is essentially an electronic ledger with the virtues of decentralization, immutability, cryptography and smart contracts. DLT thus opens many horizons for innovation beyond traditional database technology.

Blockchain in Supply Chain Industry

Supply chain is the backbone of our present global economy and ensures smooth movement of goods from the producer to the consumer.

In this mammoth industry of $16 trillion, there are huge costs of frauds, errors, as well as administrative expenditures. Historically the industry has been pioneers in deploying automation, hence it is astonishing to know that at present there is a large degree of manual procedures and processes behind such operationally complex undertakings.

It’s astounding to know that the cost of processing the paperwork can be to the tune of 15% of the shipment cost (Groenfeldt, 2017).

This exposes the need for automation, and digital transformation apart from furthering the use of blockchain.

Supply Chain Application Areas:

Havre are the major areas Blockchain is making ripples in:

Major Blockchain Trends 2021

Trends are the window into the future. These trends tell us about what the future will look like. In an interesting research done at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies, University College London, By Nikhil Vadgama and Paola Tasca, they analyse the advent of Blockchain in various segments of the supply chain.

The Agriculture/Grocery sector and the Freight/Logistics sector, and Financial sector have seen the most aggressive use of blockchain. We have discussed the trending use cases of blockchain in the article in the following section.