In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the high risk of a global recession, capital redistribution is likely to occur on the world’s markets. The prerequisites for this are already being observed. For example, faced with a financial market recession, companies offering products that are highly demanded during the coronavirus outbreak, such as napkins, sanitizers, online services, drugs, and other goods and services are showing an unprecedented increase in sales.
It is likely that many companies that have kept their share prices from falling, or even increased them, will only strengthen their positions in the near future. Supposedly, after the pandemic ends, sanitizers will be used as much as they are being used now, and users will be unlikely to unsubscribe from Netflix, given the convenience of the service and its low cost. Many things that were not previously used by society in large quantities, or the use of which was more of an experiment, have a chance of gaining universal acceptance. Among them are blockchain and remote work services.
At the same time, an increase in the number of remotely working employees and remotely performed operations does not only refer to the optimization of business processes and cost reduction (for example on the rental market), but can also mean the risk of significant financial losses. Thus, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is forecasted to inflict damages of up to $6 trillion yearly by 2021. Notably, this forecast was published by the company in 2017, when the world had not yet encountered the pandemic. Given the current situation, the above-mentioned numbers may be even graver.
According to Juniper Research, overcall cybercrime costs have reached $2 trillion at the end of 2019, forcing companies to increase their spending on cybersecurity. The main sources of threats were email and external Internet resources. Today, due to a sharp increase in demand for these instruments, losses can exceed the most pessimistic forecasts. This is likely to force businesses to drastically change their attitudes towards solutions based on blockchain technologies.
Reliability, security, transparency
Blockchain has qualities that may be in demand for reducing losses due to the growing number of information security breaches. For the first time, perhaps, these characteristics do not contradict each other. For businesses, transparency is rather an advantage in contrast to individuals, for whom it is more of a threat to the confidentiality of their personal data. The fact is that private users do not want their information to be publicly available without the possibility of deletion.
Using blockchain’s transparency, companies will be able to improve their business processes and reduce costs. Given the number of projects that have already gone bankrupt, we suggest analyzing what benefits blockchain can now offer businesses and private users.
ILCoin — DCB and the RIFT Protocol
The ILCoin team made significant strides in addressing the scalability of blockchain systems. In December of 2019, ILCoin successfully produced a 5GB block. To date, ILCoin’s block is the largest in the network — the block size of the Bitcoin network, for example, is limited to 1 MB.
The scalability problem is the main reason hindering the spread of blockchain technology. Many projects had announced their own solutions, which made a large number of transactions per second look like scalability. In fact, recording speed or bandwidth is only part of the picture. The 5GB block size allows ILCoin to offer a new product — the Decentralized Cloud Blockchain (DCB), positioning it as a cloud model of data storage, including video files and images.
At the same time, the developers used Solidity as the main programming language for creating smart contracts, which significantly increases the adaptability of the solutions offered by ILCoin. For example, Solidity is used in Microsoft Azure and SAP solutions. Given all of the above, ILCoin can become a suitable platform for deploying decentralized applications that will solve the tasks and meet the needs of businesses.
Debrief Network
The market potential is so great that we can see the entry onto it of people like Jeff Pulver — the person to whom we owe the fact that we can freely use modern instant messengers. Although the team of developers deserves attention and trust, it should be noted that today Debrief is at an early stage of development. In the future, the team plans to deploy a system that will allow for safely connecting to a variety of third-party services like Gmail and Google Docs. According to the developers, this will significantly reduce financial losses from information threats.
Tachyon VPN
Blockchain developers are not only working on B2B solutions. In early March, the Tachyon project released a decentralized VPN for all platforms, including Android and IOS.
Given the growing control of citizens by the state and law enforcement agencies, the demand for blockchain VPN can grow among users of the Internet. Centralized services store data about users on a server, which, as a rule, is poorly protected from leaks, while in a decentralized structure, the security of user data is substantially better.
Blockchain has a chance of being popularized in all segments of the economy, despite the unfolding events of this year. The financial crisis is likely to be the starting point for high-quality and breakthrough solutions using decentralized technologies. Notably, it was after the end of the recession of 2007-2008, when the Bitcoin blockchain network first appeared. In January of 2020, its audience reached more than 21 million people. Probably, in the near future, we will see a repeat of the same scenario.