So, unlike some funny guy who is planning to build a wall across border, and make the people on the other side pay for it, the rest of the wall has started walking the other way. This is the age of collaboration. This is the age where walls are falling off and the investments are also being shared by all the partners.

This is the age of Blockchain.

So far, Blockchain technology has shown it’s mettle in delivering a hack-safe robust network for secured transactions, but can it do more than that? Let’s imagine the following scenario:

In today’s world, while blockchain can identify erroneous transactions very quickly and efficiently, it can’t really detect fraud per se. For example, imagine you and I are two users of a certain blockchain. One fine morning, $10 starts coming in from your account to mine, every 30 seconds. While there is nothing illegitimate about it as long as your account has more than 10 dollars (otherwise the transaction request will be voted out by peer nodes), the blockchain can’t really do anything about this very suspicious nature of this series of transactions.

But hey, let’s sprinkle some BI magic in the situation above, shall we? What will the world look like, if we try to blend predictive analytics into the very fabric of Blockchain?

Imagine a slightly tweaked version of a blockchain network, where an additional layer of business rules is applied. The moment a new transaction is posted to the network, and even before letting the peer nodes to vote on it, an inbuilt business layer would automatically run an algorithm to check if this transaction looks suspicious. In case it does, this business rules engine can automatically suspend the transaction midway and trigger adequate downstream fraud management process. This layer can be built using predictive adaptive models shipped with BPM software, rich analytics in motion using Big data technologies, or even some COTS fraud management tool or even “smart contracts built within the blockchain itself. This single change in flow might actually be instrumental in bringing up blockchain technology as a mainstream technology for banking and financial services.

Come to think of it, this mechanism might find its way into other business cases too. What if, in a complex supply chain process for a large manufacturing corporation, upstream sellers or vendors are trying to fudge supply or purposely decreasing supplies to increase demand? Even before a human intervention is warranted to figure out that the trends are alarming, the blockchain may be made self sufficient to sit up, take notice and give out a shout back to human beings in form of alerts or reports.

Do you think this would work? What other use cases blending Blockchain and analytics can you think of? Do let me know in the comments. As always, please LIKE my IT Blog page https://ITLatte.com and connect with me at facebook.com/YourITLatte.

Happy learning! 🙂

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