Blockchain Technical Features, Business Benefits, and Adoption by Financial and Technology Companies

Modern business typically follows a model where parties negotiate and execute contracts to complete transactions. Blockchain excels at managing contracts and ensuring their smooth execution.

Depending on categories and application scenarios, the characteristics and value of blockchain differ.

From a technical standpoint, blockchain is generally considered to have:

Distributed fault tolerance: the network is highly robust, tolerating roughly one‑third of nodes in an abnormal state.

Immutability: data that has been consensually committed persists indefinitely and cannot be destroyed or altered.

Privacy protection: cryptography guarantees that unauthorized parties may receive data but cannot interpret it.

The resulting business traits may include:

Trustworthiness: blockchain provides a naturally trusted distributed ledger platform without the need for additional third‑party intermediaries.

Cost reduction: compared with traditional technologies, blockchain can shorten processing time and lower labor and maintenance expenses.

Enhanced security: blockchain facilitates reliable audit management and settlement, reducing the likelihood of fraud and various risks.

Blockchain is not a brand‑new technology created from nothing; it is the product of technological evolution reaching a threshold, so its commercial applications are closely tied to the environment that gave rise to it. Based on blockchain, any activity involving digital transactions can lower transaction and tracking costs while improving security. The author believes that whether it ultimately reduces costs will be a key factor for deep adoption.

The author further argues that any exchange process related to information, value (including currency, securities, patents, copyrights, digital goods, physical items, etc.) and credit could be inspired by or directly benefit from blockchain technology, though this will likely require a long period of exploration and validation.

Figure 1.2.4.1 – Exchange process affected by blockchain

Currently, blockchain technology has attracted the attention of many financial institutions and commercial companies.

Financial institutions that have invested in or applied blockchain technology (in no particular order) include:

Visa

Nasdaq

Goldman Sachs

Citibank

Wells Fargo

People's Bank of China

Shanghai Pudong Development Bank

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group

UBS

Deutsche Bank

DTCC

SWIFT

Some commercial and technology companies include:

IBM

Microsoft

Intel

Cisco

Accenture