Resource sharing

Currently, the sharing economy model represented by Uber and Airbnb is impacting traditional industries in many vertical fields. This model encourages people to share idle resources through the Internet. Resource sharing currently faces the following problems:

· High cost of shared process;

· Difficult to evaluate user behavior;

· Difficult to manage shared services.


Blockchain technology provides more possibilities to solve the above problems. Blockchain-based models have the potential to more directly connect the supply and demand side of a resource, while their transparent and immutable nature helps reduce friction, compared to resource-sharing models that rely on intermediaries.

Some believe that blockchain technology will become the cornerstone of a new generation of sharing economy. In my opinion, the value of blockchain in the field of resource sharing depends on whether it can achieve higher efficiency and lower cost than traditional professional suppliers or intermediaries without compromising user experience.

Short rent sharing

A number of companies offering short-term rental services are already experimenting with blockchain as a solution to the sharing challenge.

Community energy sharing

In one neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project is trying to sell solar power from homes directly over the community’s electricity network. Instead of going through the grid company, specific transactions are performed via blockchain.

Similarly,

ConsenSys and microgrid developer LO3 have proposed building a photovoltaic trading network to enable peer-to-peer energy trading.

The main challenges of these programmes include:

· Solar cell management;

· Community power grid construction;

· Power reserve system construction;

· Low cost transaction system support.

There are already a number of startup teams working on these issues, especially in hardware. The platform built through blockchain technology can solve the last problem, which is to implement a reliable transaction system within the community at a low cost.

Electric business platform

Traditionally, e-commerce platforms play an intermediary role. Once there is a dispute between the buyer and the seller, the e-commerce platform will act as a third-party organization for arbitration. This mode has the disadvantages of long cycle, lack of notarization and high cost.

OpenBazaar attempts to enable secure e-commerce transactions without intermediaries. Specifically, The distributed e-commerce platform provided by OpenBazaar uses a multi-party signature mechanism and a reputation scoring mechanism to allow multiple participants to cooperate to evaluate and solve disputes at zero cost.

Big Data Sharing

In the era of big data, value comes from data mining. The more dimensions and volume of data, the higher the potential value.

The big headaches have been how to value data, how to use it for exchange and trade, and how to keep valuable data from leaking out without permission.

Blockchain technology offers potential solutions to these problems.

The flow of data across multiple parties can be tracked and managed in real time, using a shared ledger of common records. Through the desensitization of sensitive information and the setting of access rights, blockchain can carry out fine control on the sharing authorization of big data, standardize and promote the transaction and circulation of big data.

Reduce sharing risk

Traditional resource-sharing platforms act as mediators and arbiters of economic disputes. For the blockchain sharing platform, there are still problems such as difficult digitalization of complex offline transactions. In addition to introducing credit scoring, multi-party evaluation and other mechanisms, there are also proposals to introduce insurance mechanisms to hedge risks.