Writes:  Nenad Novović, Executive Director of AmCham member company Amplitudo

In today’s world, to call information digital gold is not an understatement anymore. Credibility and quality are becoming equally if not more important than data itself. All that knowledge, info, data, messages, reports, numbers, words and instructions are being stored on data servers, server farms, clouds servers, personal computers and laptops, mobile phones and on other forms on storage devices all around the Internet and all around the world. Centralized.

One who owns a key to a database owns the information that is stored in it. Or one that has certain skills or talent to access that data can reuse it or change it on his own benefit and interest. There is a high possibility that you are feeding in new info on a daily or hourly basis: FB, Instagram, Twitter, Viber, SMS, WhatsApp, emails, forums, Google search… And, there is fair chance that your data will be used against your will and against your interest (latest scandal with Cambridge Analytica and FB).

Now imagine the opposite. That you can store information in a different way in order to avoid them being owned by individuals or companies/corporations. Also encrypted for extra protection. Sounds good? New ways of storing and exchanging data have emerged in a last couple of years with blockchain technology. ”The blockchain is simply an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value”. Decentralized.

The world is yet to understand the concept and usage of this new technology. Let me try to share a couple of short examples:

• Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and other so-called altcoins. One of the most notable applications of blockchain technology today. The blockchain is to Bitcoin, what the internet is to email. A big electronic system, on top of which you can build applications. Currency is just one. Will it substitute money as we know it today nobody knows, but it seems that it’s here to stay and that more and more people perceive it as a value. However, it has still a long way to go in order to be widely adopted. Chances are that it will cover this distance very quickly.
• Smart Contracts, one of the core tenants of any blockchain system, function as “intelligent agreement managers” that deploy access, release funds, and store information on a public ledger. An innovation in distribution and information access, these contracts are poised to eradicate inefficiency and automate past human error such that we can supplant the need for costly intermediary parties. For example, with the help of IoT devices, this technology can be implemented in the insurance industry, speeding up the whole process and wiping out any possibility of a fraud.

As you can imagine, there are seemingly infinite use cases where we can apply blockchain networks to manage identities, keep records, and secure digital relationships. This is a monumental step for society, as we can finally move past many of our most challenging, societal obstacles.

“A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong crypto economically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.” — Vitalik Buterin.

Our company, Amplitudo, is active in this field through the partnership with one of the promising cryptocurrencies – ECC. We were engaged in design and build of their official website – ecc.network, and our design team is working with ECC devs in order to deliver best user experience interface to the users. ECC is about to release small innovation in the crypto world at 20th of April 2018 – ANS (Address Name Service); which means that users can send and receive coins and data simply by using nicknames rather than the long, cumbersome wallet addresses we are used to seeing.

For ECC, this is only the beginning. When development of the multi-chain foundation is completed with an easily navigable interface and open-source platform, future developers can create new services right on top of ECC network. That’s where things will start to become interesting.

Together with ANS, they will also release new wallet called Sapphire which will act as a user interface for all their current and future services.

Apart from this partnership, we are also working hard in order to deliver some of our own products and services that will work on a decentralized blockchain. Exciting times ahead. 🙂