Top 3 Popular Blockchain Use Cases
#1 Cryptocurrency
Risk: Encrypted digital currencies identify the currency itself, but not its owner. Whoever holds the coin's encryption key owns the currency. This means that when a coin is stolen, it's gone—and you have no way of getting it back.
Solution: Storing your encryption keys in a FIPS-validated root of trust is critical to ensuring you own your keys and ultimately your cryptocurrency.
#2 Smart Contracts
Risk: A smart contract is a computer program that describes an agreement with the ability to self-execute and enforce the terms of a contract. If the blockchain is breached, a smart contract can be altered, breaking the trust of the blockchain and removing the ability for two parties to conduct business without the need for a middleman.
Solution: Securely self-execute the terms of a contract with anonymous parties through strong authentication and storing your encryption keys in a hardware root of trust, ensuring the parties are properly identified and that no one can access your data.
#3 Internet of Things (IoT)
Risk: The restrictions imposed by a traditional central-authority trust model have helped make the IoT vulnerable. Most notably Mirai-style botnets, which recently allowed hackers to easily take over thousands of IoT devices. Only protecting the IoT devices with default passwords allowed hackers to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Solution: Blockchain helps secure the IoT by providing a distributed trust model. The blockchain removes the single-point-of-failure, in turn enabling device networks to protect themselves in other ways, for example by allowing the nodes within a given network to quarantine any nodes that start behaving unusually.