Can blockchain transform HR?

With companies such as IBM, Samsung, Visa, Walmart and Barclays using blockchain across a multitude of applications including tracking supply chains, developing ‘smart’ legal contracts and expediting the clearing process for financial transactions, the capabilities of this much-discussed technology are significant.

If you’re new to the concept, blockchain technology enables a record of transactions to be stored and verified across a network and validated in real-time. Transactions can be financial in nature or purely information-based, and because the network records each transaction (the ‘block’) and maintains a permanent and unalterable historical record of transactions (the ‘chain’), there is limited scope for fraud. Imagine a room full of people and one person lends money to another, with everyone in the room agreeing upon and writing down the exact details of the transaction and keeping the record with them, and you start to get the idea.

It is for this reason that immediate applications became apparent in the financial world, with the ability for computer networks to replace banks in maintaining financial records. Logic follows that if a computer network is able to record the transactions usually carried out by a bank, why not integrate how we represent currency itself and remove the possibility of fraud which is so rife in our current system. It was this line of thinking that created Bitcoin with blockchain as the enabling technology.

With the ability to maintain an accurate record of validated information, providing a shared and immediately available ‘one version of the truth’, blockchain certainly has the potential to transform the way we do business.