Not very long ago, if you wanted to order food, you had to dial the restaurant and give your order. The process was a bit hectic, had little options, but nevertheless, it was simple with only two parties involved- the business and the consumer. Then came a wave of third-party restaurant aggregators and food delivery applications where you could browse all the restaurants in your vicinity and make your order on a click. The businesses too got access to a larger consumer base and delivery. A win-win.
And this isn’t just about the food business but has happened across all domains. From transportation and healthcare to e-commerce and real estate, there are large corporations today whose whole business is to be the middleman between consumers and sellers. After all, Uber doesn’t own all the taxis nor does Amazon everything it sells on its platform. Yet they are the ones who exert control over all the consumers and service providers. And as the market matures and these companies gain more control, they are in a position to undermine both the parties for their own benefit thus turning the initial proposition of win-win into lose-lose.
But the wheel of change is again on the move and at the center of it is the new technology you may have head about – Blockchain. Widely known as a decentralized ledger system, it is already helping service providers to directly reach out to customers without requiring an intermediary. Let’s take a look at two examples for better understanding the concept:
Arcade City is a ride-hailing app just like Uber except it works on a decentralized network. The drivers are free to fix their own fares, routes, payment method and virtually everything they want. The riders can then pick drivers of their choice and rate them to boost their popularity. This way, the drivers are incentivized to offer their best service users get to benefit from the competition.
INS Ecosystem works similarly in food shopping. It has all the local manufacturers and suppliers as service providers with their own rates and features and consumers can directly purchase from them- cutting grocery stores from in-between.
Out of many, this approach has three major upsides:
Cutting Down Monopolies
There are many industries today where a single company controls an unproportional number of suppliers and consumers and thus have the leverage to set arbitrary terms. With decentralized applications, there is no scope for monopolies because there is no one entity that controls the network.
Transparency
Currently, most of the business operations of these companies are hidden beneath an array of complex algorithms that take into account parameters that neither users or service providers are aware of. This makes the entire system opaque and draws a curtain between both the parties. For instance, if the company raises the price, the users may think that it is because of the shortage of supply while the service providers may believe it is it’s because peaking demand but nobody knows for sure. With decentralized applications, there is no scope for such manipulation.
Cost
When you look at the market valuation of these platforms, it becomes evident that they don’t create such infrastructure and facilitate business out of the goodness of heart. They make fortunes doing it. So when they are eliminated out of the system, those fortunes essentially return to the pockets of consumers and individual businesses.
Now if you are thinking of building an app on such architecture, you need to first get the basics right because the technology is still at a nascent stage and whatever product you develop now will see many transformations in the years to come. So it will be better to get a professional app development company with expertise in related technologies on your side and take proper development channels to keep the app future-proof.
