Today, enterprises face new challenges daily such as information security, trust and transparency between different stakeholders. The emergence of blockchain technology and smart contracts provides new opportunities for enterprises to solve these problems.

Blockchain enabled smart contracts can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the involvement of any central authority. Smart contracts enables the ability for enterprises to collaborate and provide self-executable, enforced contract clauses in a blockchain network without the involvement of a third-party. 

While smart contracts provide new options for enterprises and several studies have been carried out on how smart contracts can be applied to solve issues affecting modern enterprises, little is known about the adoption of smart contracts in enterprises. 

Overview of Business Applications Supporting Smart Contracts

The primary question is how to successfully adopt smart contracts in modern enterprises? Phrased in another way, what are the domains of smart contract applications in established enterprises? The understanding of domains using smart contracts helps enterprises during the decision making process about smart contracts adoption. What are the main benefits of smart contract applications in these enterprise domains? 

An two-part article published last year by QURAS talks about the creation of blockchain consortiums and explains various blockchain use cases that can apply to enterprises such as supply chain management, protecting digital identity, improved artificial intelligence, medical data protection and management, energy cost reduction, and land title registration, to name a few.

Integration of Privacy Technologies

In more decentralized systems, surveillance is more difficult to achieve, although not Impossible, because there is no single entity that controls and manages the flow of information.

However, to the extent that users need to secure and trace their own transactions, bad securitization practices and security flaws in client-side software become much more relevant, especially when data is stored on users’ devices.

Thanks to QURAS use of Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Ring Signature privacy technologies, users can choose which private transaction method to use for their transactions on the QURAS ‘Privacy 2.0’ blockchain, as well as the suitable privacy level for any transaction purpose. QURAS users and enterprises may select whether their transactions will be public, partially private, or completely private. The advantages of privacy technologies are plenty: 

• Privacy technologies can protect user privacy during remittance and while using a smart contract on a blockchain. 
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs enable the complete anonymity of transactions. 
• Ring Signature technology enables fast and light anonymous transactions, and adds privacy to both sides of any particular transaction. 
• When using Zero-Knowledge Proof and Ring Signature in combination, users can adopt a digital ID while still adhering to regulatory compliance, enabling real world use cases that require verified identification that cannot be tampered with  or manipulated. 

Conclusion

Blockchain technologies in particular are paving the way for new forms of disintermediation which can increase an individual’s or a whole enterprise’s ability to protect their privacy and data confidentiality. While it might be harder to implement a decentralized system that is fully privacy-compliant, transparency and privacy should, however, not be regarded as being in a fundamental conflict. Quite to the contrary, the two are to a large extent compatible, and perhaps even complementary in certain cases.