How Salesforce is marking its stance with Blockchain Technology

Introduction

We all have been so dependent on technology that none of us can think of surviving sans it. We also expect technology to evolve by each day for better experience and ROI. Blockchain is one such technology that has given us a brand new reason to be happy and feel secure in this data-driven era. By definition, Blockchain is a growing list of records linked using cryptography.

“72% of customers (both consumers and business buyers) believe that blockchain technology will transform their expectations of companies within the next five years.”

SALESFORCE | STATE OF THE CONNECTED CUSTOMER, 2018

Let’s understand how Blockchain has become the most trusted technology – a reason that caught Salesforce’s attention

Before talking about Salesforce Blockchain, let’s understand it in detail. You could say Blockchain technology is a safe architecture that protects and traces data in a way that can be distributed and verified by a defined set of people in the network. This technology promises to fundamentally change how we share information, buy and sell things, and check the authenticity of the information we bank on every single day — from what we buy to when we transact.

Let us understand more with an example. Every business involves multiple people from the same and different organizations, particularly in today’s connected world. Think about the journey of a simple shirt manufacturer:

During the entire course of making and selling a shirt, a lot of transactions happen among growers, weavers, shippers, customers. Because there is a need to track all these transactions, we need ledgers. A general ledger tracks precise information, such as the date of purchase, amounts transferred between participants (the growers, weavers, and shippers), etc.

But there’s one problem with this approach, traditional ledgers are inefficient, subject to error, and tampering. Think about the shirt manufacturing process. Growers and weavers have their ledgers. However, when people do business together, they have to be prepared for their business growth. When they don’t, it may lead to disagreements, from buyers requesting refunds and involving banks for action and more. Things could become more difficult. Having out-of-sync ledgers between participants lead to poor business decisions. To improve such a process, the distributed ledger technology came into the picture. This is a kind of database that is shared, replicated, and synchronized among parties, to make things easy. No intermediary is required. Every record in the distributed ledger has an encrypted timestamp and is an auditable, permanent record for all transactions. Blockchain records transactions between peer-to-peer networks. It’s a distributed ledger with superpowers.

In Blockchain we have Nodes, Blocks, and the network validates all blocks which are linked from the beginning to the most recent ones. All the Blockchain integral parts mentioned makes it temper proof where altering any existing transaction will break the chain.

Even after being secure, Blockchain is a complicated technology, and many companies are finding it challenging to unlock its full value. Here enlisting exciting features of Blockchain:

</