The distributed ledger technology called blockchain is no more seen as only a technology that powers digital currencies. In recent years, we have seen its enormous use cases across finance, supply chain, cloud storage, aviation, agriculture and so on.
Except for the technological benefits that blockchain offers these, and many other, industries, there’s a paradigm shift that it has brought in the way the world conducts business. Blockchain has given us the resources to redefine how we see competition and collaboration in the business landscape.
The current capitalist economy functions such that each company owns its assets and makes its products better to rise above its competitors. In simple words, in such a system, a company earns more profits only when the others working in the same sector see a dip in theirs.
Blockchain technology creates a business economy that fosters collaborative competition. It promotes collaboration between competitors in a manner that each party involved takes away some form of benefit from the coalition. Let’s see how:
Blockchains are distributed networks that rely on hundreds of nodes to agree on a single result in real-time to keep the network up and running. Whether we speak of permissioned blockchains or permissionless ones, reaching a consensus to approve transactions is a business process where we can find collaborative competition.
Mining new blocks is a lucrative business where each node on the network competes against all others to be the first to generate the hash for the next block. To do this in a proof-of-work consensus protocol, all the nodes spend huge sums on deploying mining hardware with the highest possible computational power. In protocols like proof-of-stake or delegated-proof-of-stake, nodes stake the maximum possible tokens to have a higher chance at generating the next block hash.
On the other hand, the same nodes must also show the collaborative effort to agree to a block hash generated by a node in order to reach a consensus and approve the addition of the new block and move to mine the next one.
Blockchain networks such as Alacrity provide various tools and development kits so individual developers and businesses can create innovative decentralised applications on the open-source platform. Different companies and app developers can collaborate on the platform to easily build new features for an application or add new services so it benefits both parties. This is also crucial for brainstorming ideas and coming up with better solutions to push blockchain for wider adoption throughout the world.
On the competitive side, these same developers or businesses also have their own DApps and services that they want to build better than their competitors and attract more users.
Sharing economy models
A sharing economy is one of the biggest pros of blockchain networks. Today, most digital platforms do not include their users in their economy model when it comes to sharing the revenue. However, most blockchain platforms are known to reward their users for their contribution to the network or platform. Some share rewards for content creation while others reward viewers for viewing ads.
Blockchain networks also take into consideration the opinions of the community members and render them rights to stake tokens and vote to propose or pass any reforms. There are also rewards users can earn by choosing to vote on the network. This reflects the collaboration between business owners and users to create a more sustainable economic model.
Competition and collaboration are fundamental to human development. But in their present state, they are not as effective and also result in the creation of monopolies, as we see across all industries. Blockchain redefines collaborative competition and creates a levelled playground for every individual and business to innovate and build better solutions.