ICAS ICAS logo

Quicklinks

  1. About Us

    Find out about who we are and what we do here at ICAS.

  2. Find a CA

    Search our directory of individual CAs and Member organisations by name, location and professional criteria.

  3. CA Magazine

    View the latest issues of the dedicated magazine for ICAS Chartered Accountants.

  4. Contact Us

    Get in touch with ICAS by phone, email or post, with dedicated contacts for Members, Students and firms.

Login
  • Annual renewal
  • About us
  • Contact us
  • Find a CA
  1. About us
    1. Governance
  2. Members
    1. Become a member
    2. Newly qualified
    3. Manage my membership
    4. Benefits of membership
    5. Careers support
    6. Mentoring
    7. CA Wellbeing
    8. More for Members
    9. Area networks
    10. International communities
    11. Get involved
    12. Top Young CAs
    13. Career breaks
    14. ICAS podcast
    15. Newly admitted members 2022
    16. Newly admitted members 2023
  3. CA Students
    1. Student information
    2. Student resources
    3. Learning requirements
    4. Learning updates
    5. Learning blog
    6. Totum Pro | Student discount card
    7. CA Student wellbeing
  4. Become a CA
    1. How to become a CA
    2. Routes to becoming a CA
    3. CA Stories
    4. Find a training agreement
    5. Why become a CA
    6. Qualification information
    7. University exemptions
  5. Employers
    1. Become an Authorised Training Office
    2. Resources for Authorised Training Offices
    3. Professional entry
    4. Apprenticeships
  6. Find a CA
  7. ICAS events
    1. CA Summit
  8. CA magazine
  9. Insight
    1. Finance + Trust
    2. Finance + Technology
    3. Finance + EDI
    4. Finance + Mental Fitness
    5. Finance + Leadership
    6. Finance + Sustainability
  10. Professional resources
    1. Anti-money laundering
    2. Audit and assurance
    3. Brexit
    4. Business and governance
    5. Charities
    6. Coronavirus
    7. Corporate and financial reporting
    8. Cyber security
    9. Ethics
    10. Insolvency
    11. ICAS Research
    12. Pensions
    13. Practice
    14. Public sector
    15. Sustainability
    16. Tax
  11. CPD - professional development
    1. CPD courses and qualifications
    2. CPD news and updates
    3. CPD support and advice
  12. Regulation
    1. Complaints and sanctions
    2. Regulatory authorisations
    3. Guidance and help sheets
    4. Regulatory monitoring
  13. CA jobs
    1. CA jobs partner: Rutherford Cross
    2. Resources for your job search
    3. Advertise with CA jobs
    4. Hays | A Trusted ICAS CA Jobs Partner
    5. Azets | What's your ambition?
  14. Work at ICAS
    1. Business centres
    2. Meet our team
    3. Benefits
    4. Vacancies
    5. Imagine your career at ICAS
  15. Contact us
    1. Technical and regulation queries
    2. ICAS logo request

How blockchain is changing our world

  • LinkedIn (opens new window)
  • Twitter (opens new window)
By Alan Simpson CA

4 April 2019

Key points:

  • The term blockchain is often associated with crypto-currencies.
  • However, there are many other innovative uses of blockchain technology.
  • This article lists some examples of these new applications of blockchain technology.

Most people without specialist knowledge would link the phrase “blockchain technology” with crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin. This article examines some other uses of the features of blockchain, but which do not directly involve the use of crypto-currencies.

Some of these uses are:

1.  Supply chain monitoring

This term covers the sequence of the individual processes along the route from producer to the ultimate consumer of a product or service. For example, the sequence of steps required in the production of a jar of instant coffee from the raw material of the coffee beans to ultimately the jar of coffee for sale on the supermarket shelf. The introduction of blockchain to administer the supply chain is stated to lead to greater control overall for all participants by

  • Providing consensus by enabling all parties on a permissioned blockchain to have the same version of data.
  • Improving stock control and working capital needs.
  • Improving connectability.
  • Greater transparency.
  • Reducing errors and fraud.
  • Improving product traceability and quickly flagging up any issues over quality or contamination.
  • Reducing delays from documentation being mislaid.
  • Improving the ability to monitor the provenance, authenticity and trust in a product (e.g. the horse meat “scandal” reported in 2013 over the mis-labelling of some brands of ready-made meals and frozen beef burgers sold in some UK supermarkets due to supplier fraud).
  • Helping to guard against illicit “counterfeiting” of ingredients of a product somewhere along the supply chain.
  • Making it much easier to audit the supply chain and to give greater credence to claims that the product is “from sustainable sources” or is “Fairtrade”.

Examples of using blockchain technology in this area include the US supermarket chain Walmart which has worked with IBM to develop a complete traceability system (called IBM Food Trust) using blockchain technology. Walmart will initially apply this tracking system to the batches of fresh green vegetables they sell in their shops.

Per a memo to their  suppliers entitled “Walmart Food Traceability Initiative” and dated 24 September 2018,  it states that  from 31 January 2019 it will now require all its “direct suppliers” of leafy greens (lettuce, cabbage, spinach, kale etc) to its US shops be traceable on this blockchain and later  all “end- to- end” suppliers to be similarly traceable back to the farm by 30 September 2019. Another example is Adelphi Distillery Ltd, the Scotch whisky blender and bottler, which uses a blockchain (developed by Advanced Research Cryptology) to safeguard the authenticity of its whisky (Ardnamurchan) from the risk of possible counterfeiting.

2. Diamonds

In May 2018, the world’s leading diamond producer (De Beers Group) reported that it had developed in conjunction with five major diamond processors, a blockchain platform called Tracr to enable full tracking of diamonds from the mine, through the various processing stages of preparation ultimately to the retailer. The Company announced that it had successfully tracked 100 high-value diamonds during a pilot run of Tracr and this was the first time that precious stones had been tracked from diamond mine to the jeweller’s shop by using digital technology.

This platform, which is not associated with Bitcoin, uses blockchain technology to give assurance and added confidence to members of the diamond industry (such as diamond traders, merchants, brokers, polishers, cutters, financiers and retailers) on the authenticity and provenance of diamonds they wish to purchase.

3. Art auctions

In the autumn of 2018, the world-famous auction house Christie’s announced that it had achieved an industry “first” by using blockchain technology to register and then track the auction of a large collection of some 42 pieces of American Modernist art with a reported value of $318 million. Christie’s worked with Artory, a specialised software company, to create a permissioned (also known as a private) blockchain to hold publicly available (to those allowed to access the blockchain) encrypted data on each of the artworks such as title and description, auction dates and final price it reached.

However, it does not include information which would identify to users who the owners of the artwork are as this remains strictly private. On conclusion of the sale, the buyer will then be given a card by the auction house to enable them to see an encrypted record of information about their purchase on the Artory registry.

4. Music industry

Major commercial features in this industry are ownership of works (such as songs and instrumental pieces), arrangements, royalties earned and their subsequent payment to artistes and the multiplicity of parties and streams of information which can arise. The music industry has now largely moved from consumers traditionally buying music in a shop (lately in the form usually of a CD album) to having a digital download from a streaming service which is either free or only costs them a small amount. A feature of this major shift has been that the revenues due to artistes for their music has slumped. It is claimed that blockchain, using “smart contracts”[i], can:

  • Streamline the process of calculating royalty payments due to the various parties and administering their subsequent disbursement.
  • Create and maintain a complete and definitive database of music rights for artistes, songwriters and arrangers.
  • Improve transparency.

Examples of the use of organisations using blockchain in the music industry are eMusic, Blokur, Choon, Musicoin and Mycelia.

5. Blockchain government – an example

The city of Dubai in the UAE is working towards the goal of becoming the first blockchain-based government by the year 2020. It intends to digitise completely its services (such as licence renewals, payment for municipal services and visa applications) and make existing paper-based systems redundant. Dubai has also recently introduced its official state e-currency called emCash. Its aim is stated as “efficiency, industry creation and international leadership”.

6. Land Registry

Another use of blockchain is for holding details of land ownership and legal title. For example, the UK government’s HM Land Registry (a long-established government department whose function is to register the ownership of land and property in England and Wales) is working on a project (called Digital Street) to investigate how the use of blockchain technology and smart contracts could improve the services it provides to the public for house buying and selling. The Registry is collaborating on this project with the software company Methods who will use a blockchain platform called Corda.

7. Digital archives

An archive will nowadays have not only paper records but now also digital ones. However, a feature of digital records is that technology is not static but is constantly evolving and that computer file formats originally used to store data will become obsolete. To get around this problem, it will be necessary at intervals to transfer (“migrate”) the contents of a file from the “old” format to a “new” file format so that its contents can still be read in the future.

Clearly, this exercise may be needed to be carried out on numerous successive occasions depending upon the pace and extent of technology change. A potential weakness is that undetected and unauthorised changes could be made to the digital record. How can users be confident that the record available to see or hear today is essentially the same as was originally deposited in the archive? How can they be assured of the integrity of the archive as a keeper of the digital public record?

To tackle this challenge, there is a research project called ARCHANGEL and using blockchain, to show if a digital record has been modified, if so by whom and why it was done so that it can still be regarded years later as the authentic record. This project involves The National Archives (of the UK), the University of Surrey, the UK Open Data Institute and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

8. Marriage licences

This must be one of the more unusual uses of blockchain! The first blockchain marriage (a form of smart contract) took place in 2014 in Florida.

9. Marine insurance

A specialised section of the insurance industry has recently developed a private blockchain platform for administering marine insurance and called Insurwave. This will enable all the parties involved in the marine insurance process to be brought together on a single platform for the first time and to improve efficiency in administration. It has been developed together by EY and the software security company Guardtime and is used by their pilot client, A.P. Møller-Maersk (the largest container shipping company in the world) for its fleet of around 350 container vessels.

10. Healthcare  

Blockchain technology is now being increasingly used within the healthcare sector in areas such as:

  • Creating one set of decentralised shared registers of vaccines and medicines received by patients.
  • Storing data from clinical trials and keeping it secure.
  • Guarding against counterfeit drugs.
  • Streamlining and modernising medical records to enable more efficient sharing of them in a secure way by health professionals.

[i] Smart contracts are defined as “a computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract”. (Wikipedia)

ICAS logo

Footer links

  • Contact us
  • Terms and conditions
  • Modern slavery statement
  • Privacy notice
  • CA magazine

Connect with ICAS

  • Facebook (opens new window) Facebook Icon
  • Twitter (opens new window) Twitter Icon
  • LinkedIn (opens new window) LinkedIn Icon
  • Instagram (opens new window) Instagram Icon

ICAS is a member of the following bodies

  • Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies (opens new window) Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies logo
  • Chartered Accountants Worldwide (opens new window) Chartered Accountants Worldwide logo
  • Global Accounting Alliance (opens new window) Global Accounting Alliance
  • International Federation of Accountants (opens new window) IFAC
  • Access Accountancy (opens new window) Access Acountancy

Charities

  • ICAS Foundation (opens new window) ICAS Foundation
  • SCABA (opens new window) scaba

Accreditations

  • ISO 9001 - RGB (opens new window)
© ICAS 2022

The mark and designation “CA” is a registered trade mark of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS), and is available for use in the UK and EU only to members of ICAS. If you are not a member of ICAS, you should not use the “CA” mark and designation in the UK or EU in relation to accountancy, tax or insolvency services. The mark and designation “Chartered Accountant” is a registered trade mark of ICAS, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales and Chartered Accountants Ireland. If you are not a member of one of these organisations, you should not use the “Chartered Accountant” mark and designation in the UK or EU in relation to these services. Further restrictions on the use of these marks also apply where you are a member.

ICAS logo

Our cookie policy

ICAS.com uses cookies which are essential for our website to work. We would also like to use analytical cookies to help us improve our website and your user experience. Any data collected is anonymised. Please have a look at the further information in our cookie policy and confirm if you are happy for us to use analytical cookies: