Let’s think about putting physical assets on blockchain

BLOCKCHAINS have allowed trading digital resources and assets against some economic value. And this has led the world into another level of sharing economy.

For instance, using blockchain, I can rent out some space on my hard disk and get paid for it. And in another example, I can write a Smart Contract that can sell music to customers and make sure the artist is paid a proper royalty.

But all these examples are of sharing or trading a digital product.

What about the physical asset?

Fingerprinting physical assets

When I travel and talk to some of the tech industry’s brightest minds, I am always asked:

“If blockchain is all about record keeping, can we buy and sell land on it?”

I always end up saying, “Yes and No. Yes, it is theoretically possible, but it comes with some consequences. What if someone sells a land to someone on blockchain and sells the same land to someone else the conventional way?”

Both the buyers would be verifying the ownership on different databases, and that would be a problem.

But besides that, can we put physical assets on blockchain? I have an idea.

Take Earth as an example.

What if we mark all of Earth with one-centimeter boxes and put each of these on the blockchain. Its geographical coordinates will denote each box. That would make the entire planet available on the blockchain for people to claim.

Take medicines as another example.

If the manufacturer can put the composition and the unique batch number of every drug on the blockchain, this information will be publicly available for verification by anyone. With that, every step of the entire supply chain can be tracked. It’ll also help remove counterfeit drugs from the world.

What if we can put all these physical assets on the blockchain?

The day that happens, a lot of opportunities will open up to build the tokens for.

Republished with permission from Unmade. 

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