Blockchain technology's significant characteristics are transparency, accessibility, affordability, and security. These features are also one of the things that small businesses need, and blockchain technology can be effectively used to solve these issues for small businesses.
One of the things that small businesses lack is huge capital, and blockchain provides the perfect opportunity to access many innovative services at a cheaper cost. In this article, you will learn some of the smart features of blockchain which you can use to make things easier as a small business owner.
1. Crypto Payments
One of the issues small businesses face is payment, and the unreliability of banks has made things worse than they are supposed to be. Integrating blockchain for business will help small business owners make tons of domestic and international payments cheaper.
The central selling point of blockchain technology is how decentralized it is. When blockchain is applied to payment by small businesses, it helps them to eliminate the need for intermediaries such as banks and other financial institutions. They connect directly to their customers and make payments at a faster and cheaper rate.
Crypto payments come in very handy when you have international customers or employees you must pay. Using a bank to make such payments comes at astronomical fees, and it can take quite some time to reflect. Unlike crypto payments, blockchain technology enables small businesses to make international payments without paying huge transaction fees.
In most cases, they need to exchange addresses for the amount to be made, and it reflects almost immediately. Apart from being cheap and fast, crypto fees integrated into small businesses helps to guarantee security. Unlike the banks, there's also transparency as both the small business and their clients can see how much was charged and the payment made. Blockchain technology uses a public ledger to make payment details public.
2. Identity Authentication
The major business infrastructure of most small businesses is on the internet, and cyber attackers are aware of this fact. With this in mind, these cyber criminals start attacking small businesses by stealing passwords to impersonate the business owners. This shows the high identity theft rate and impersonation among small businesses.
Nevertheless, blockchain technology solves all of these problems with identity authentication. With the blockchain, small companies don't have to worry about storing their passwords in browsers that are never secure. They don't also have to worry about paying web security providers to secure their passwords.
With blockchain technology, one of the major priorities is to ensure that one does not impersonate another person. They do this by providing trusted and reliable ways for small businesses to verify their identity without compromising security. Blockchain employs what is called digital signatures to verify and authenticate the identity of any business. This is primarily through private keys, which are almost impossible to guess by any cybercriminal.
3. Cloud Storage
As mentioned above, many businesses have their entire business infrastructure online, which can only be possible through cloud storage. While traditional cloud storage is very flexible and secures data, it comes at a painful expense.
The cost of having the appropriate cloud space needed by small businesses to run their business activity can be very astronomical. This has caused some small businesses to spend much of their revenue on cloud storage. However, blockchain technology has been working behind the scenes to ensure small businesses don't worry so much about cloud storage.
New cloud storage providers powered by the blockchain for the business initiative are creating a new form of cloud storage that changes the whole process for small businesses. These blockchain-based cloud companies provide cloud storage at a cheaper rate than traditional providers. Also, they are now changing the cloud storage sector to look like Airbnb. This means that small businesses now have the opportunity to rent out spaces they are not using for an amount of money.
4. Gift Cards
Every business knows that gift cards are one of the ways of promoting and marketing one's business. However, it can come with many issues relating to the tracking and identification of gift cards from customers. Cybercriminals also use gift cards nowadays, and they now have a way of duplicating them to defraud small businesses.
While gift cards have immense potentials, such as the expansion of brand name and payment methods, they also come with challenges. It is these challenges that blockchain technology seeks to solve among small businesses reinventing how gift cards are used.
With the use of blockchain technology's public ledger, it makes it possible for small businesses to track down their gift cards and prevent any duplicates. When gift cards are prevented from being duplicated, it helps small businesses to reduce the number of losses. With the blockchain's public ledger, a company can point out whether a gift card has been used.
5. New Method of Raising Funds
If you are a business owner, you should know that one of the significant challenges most business owners face is the issue of raising funds for their business. Small businesses can find it incredibly hard to raise funds since they would mainly depend on their savings or loans.
When scrutinized, this is not the best way of raising money for one's business, and it is not even readily available despite the troubles. So, blockchain technology wants to change the way small businesses raise funds for their business through tokenization.
Tokenization starts when a business launches its token on the blockchain, potentially leading to many investors putting their funds into the project. Small companies can easily do this through Initial Token Offerings (ITOs), which come as a better substitute for lenders or equities. Launching a token will help increase the brand reach of the business and can potentially grow them to a large company. Besides this, launching a token also helps small businesses to develop a community that will promote their brand for free.