Blockchain Applications and Business Use Cases
This domain tests whether you can judge fit between a business problem and blockchain, and describe credible implementations in supply chain, finance, identity, healthcare and tokenization. Strong answers identify the multi-party trust gap and the data that must be shared, and they separate on-chain anchors from off-chain records.
Core rules
- Good fit: multiple organizations with conflicting incentives, a shared source of truth, an audit trail requirement, and disintermediation value. Poor fit: single-owner databases, highly confidential bulk data, or sub-second high-volume workloads with no trust gap.
- Supply chain: provenance, serialization, recall targeting and customs documentation across producers, carriers and regulators.
- Trade finance: letters of credit, bills of lading and receivables where banks, shippers and insurers reconcile separate records.
- Identity: self-sovereign identity using DIDs and verifiable credentials, with selective disclosure rather than dumping personal data on-chain.
- Tokenization: security tokens, stablecoins and CBDCs; these are regulatory and monetary designs as much as technical ones.
- Design artifacts: proof of concept, pilot, governance model, integration with ERP and identity systems, and a cost-benefit case.
Worked example
A retailer needs to trace contaminated produce within minutes across farms, processors, distributors and stores. Each party keeps its own records, recalls currently take days, and regulators require an audit trail. A permissioned consortium ledger fits: each participant writes events for its custody step, sensor and batch data stay off-chain with hashes and identifiers anchored on-chain, and smart contracts enforce hand-off rules. Reasoning: there are multiple distrusting parties, a shared traceability need and a clear latency reduction. A payroll system at one company would not qualify - single owner, confidential data, no trust gap.
Traps
- Claiming blockchain “builds trust” without naming the parties and the trust gap.
- Putting personal or regulated bulk data directly on-chain.
- Ignoring the oracle problem when external data drives contracts.
- Forgetting that immutability conflicts with erasure rights such as GDPR deletion.
- Treating a token as automatically a currency or a security without legal analysis.