Blockchain In Retail: Still A Long Way To Go

By Rishma Banerjee

Blockchain technology, inspite of its widespread acceptance today, has a long way to go as far as retail is concerned.

There has been much debate and differential works on the algorithms to generate the next token or the algorithms that are focused on the other parts of blockchain but these minute differences do not matter in retail.
Retailers are mostly interested on the functional aspects of a system, that is, its Performance, Privacy, and Ease of Use.

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Blockchain has not yet received a significant success with respect to these aspects. Let us look more objectively.

Performance:

Blockchain performance in retail can be utilized in chiefly two places: payments and programmatic advertising.
In blockchain-driven payments, the speed of processing a consumer payment becomes extremely important. For these to be adopted in retail, it needs to be faster and more efficient than the payment processes currently in use.
Studies show, both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum(ETH) are lagging way behind in comparison to VISA.
In programmatic advertising, it’s an even more acute problem, because the sub-nanosecond decisions that go into what advertising to load when one views a web page can sometimes involve dozens of parties, all operating in miniscule fractions of a second. Google alone processes about 40,000 searches per secondon an average.

Privacy

The Bitcoin was created mainly to be used for anonymous trading but blockchain tracks the behavior of all Bitcoin owners which becomes available to all users via the “distributed ledger”
Companies like Microsoft are aiming to face this issue by steps like the Confidential Consortium framework, by which, companies can use ETH with greater privacy. The solution involves off-chain settlement, utilizing edge hardware and environments like Intel’s “trusted execution environments.”
Blockchain data is protected only by a password. This is not secure enough in cases of loss of password or hacking.

Ease of Use:

Blockchain has now become a lot more accessible to people with simpler payment gateways and crypto wallets. Consumers are becoming more and more aware of it.
For blockchain to have a definitive use in retail, its foremost requirement is maturity, as a system. A lot of innovation and change is yet to come for blockchain to receive a wider acceptability in market use.