Web3 technology leads business change: application prospects in 2024

Source: Blockchain Knight

The common refrain is that 2023 will be a challenging year for Web3 adoption. Following the high-profile collapse in 2022, users and funds fled, the market fell into a bear market, and venture capital investment also fell sharply from the previous year.

However, this narrative can only give an approximate description and does not always reveal the full picture.

While the Crypto asset market and startup financing did decline in 2023, the application and development of Web3 in institutions and enterprises is accelerating.

Financial companies and central banks are launching ambitious experiments, such as asset management giant Franklin Templeto’s tokenized money market on the Polygon blockchain, or Société Générale’s recent listing on Crypto asset exchange Bitstamp Euro-backed stablecoin.

At the same time, major brands such as Nike, Visa and Gucci have also further promoted their Web3 efforts by launching token- and NFT-based loyalty reward and participation programs for customers.

In addition, based on this trend and the development of the underlying blockchain technology to be more enterprise-friendly, we expect more use cases and industry applications to emerge in 2024.

Healthcare is one example, where Web3 has long held high promise for, for example, keeping patient records more efficiently.

However, health care companies naturally cannot take the "move fast and break things" actions that typical start-up technology companies do, so promises have been delayed in delivering.

Now, privacy-focused ZK (zero-knowledge) solutions, increasingly usable, are bearing fruit.

Blockchain-native medical projects such as Solve and Care have been developed for several years and can now use ZK technology to facilitate clinical trials.

However, development platforms such as Namada offer established healthcare providers a way to experiment with Web3 technology in a secure and flexible environment. Namada uses ZK proofs to encrypt on-chain data while allowing data to be stored on multiple chains and providing custom privacy and access control.

Integrating ZK technology at the platform level rather than the application level can also apply the technology to a range of other use cases.

Namada demonstrates the possibilities of its platform through an incentivized test network based on a multiplayer game, in which players compete against each other to perform shielded transfers of Crypto assets on almost any blockchain.

The ability for players to participate in clandestine activities is an important part of many games, and it is only just becoming possible using ZK technology on the blockchain.

Similar to healthcare, adoption of Web3 technology in voting systems for purposes such as public elections or shareholder voting has been slow due to inherent risk aversion and the lack of sufficiently scalable private platforms.

However, Indian academics have found that blockchain-based voting systems can strengthen the democratic process, increase voter participation by allowing people to vote from their own homes, save time and public resources, and reduce the incidence of false voting registrations. quantity.

Introducing new encryption methods on-chain makes blockchain-based voting applications a reality. Fhenix is ​​the first platform to introduce FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) into the blockchain ecosystem, enabling data to be encrypted and computed on-chain without moving it off-chain.

Fhenix is ​​also an EVM-compatible second-layer platform, which means it is open to Ethereum developers, allowing them to use the familiar Solidity smart contract language to build cryptographic intelligence for voting applications or a range of other use cases. contract.

Blockchain infrastructure has also made great progress. Just a few years ago, many blockchains operated like walled gardens, unable to handle data coming from outside because the data required the same trustless verification as on-chain activity.

The emergence of oracle has brought off-chain data to the chain to a certain extent, but a project called "Space and Time" has gone further on this basis and developed a decentralized data warehouse. Enables smart contracts to retrieve and process data using SQL and verify it using ZK proofs.

However, Space and Time also recognizes that SQL does not cover 100% of business use cases, so it has now developed a similar solution for long-running Python jobs.

It enables anyone to pull data from an existing database and load it into Space and Time without using any code, and then connect a Python job to a smart contract with ZK proof guarantees.

The solution enables a host of new blockchain use cases, such as tamper-proof price calculations for on-chain perpetual options, or the development of on-chain indices based on large amounts of data fed off-chain.

What we are seeing in the development of enterprise blockchain is at a critical juncture, and the momentum for enterprise blockchain adoption has begun to accelerate.

2024 looks set to be a turning point when interest meets truly ready Web3 technology for the first time.