Introduction

This document provides a selection of use cases to illustrate a spectrum of applications of distributed ledger technologies including the blockchain (hereafter referred to as DLT). The use cases reflect various international domains, business and industry sectors and processes.

The use cases help to identify actual and potential applications of the technology in the given context, along with relevant requirements, options, benefits, and risk mitigation strategies.

The framework of this document enables this approach by providing a perspective of use cases that goes beyond the traditional vertical sectors or DLT attributes. This document provides assessment across five different categories to provide technology, market and social perspectives. The visualisation of user flows and architecture enables a broader perspective of the role of a DLT as part of on-ledger and off ledger ecosystems. By assessing current DLT implementations, these use cases provide learnings that apply to governance, compliance, interoperability, cross-border regulations, and scalability.

The open innovation approach to use cases can contribute to accelerating the implementation of these new technologies and help reduce the instance of duplication or repeated solution development. This bridge of new information and existing standards can also inform innovators and SMEs to adopt a standards-based approach to build the future of DLT, especially where new decentralised business models apply for example in areas such as financial technology (fintech) and the energy sector.

This document is arranged in three sections for easy reference and comparison.

Clauses 4, 5, and 6 describe the approach, process and criteria of use case selection and study. This provides a guide to the template structure and five key categories that draw out the impact of DLT attributes across transversal (related technologies), horizontal (attributes), vertical (sector specific), United Nations Sustainable development goals (SDGs) and status (from pilot to implementation stages). The use cases each have a set of visualizations that provide further detail of DLT activity as well as the relationship to the user and technology ecosystem. The diagrams include data flow models, a reference architecture from a single node view, and behavioural UML. As such, the template and diagrams provide a detailed insight into the individual use case.

Clause 7 provides commentary on the trends identified in the use case. This provides analysis of categories and DLT types in the use cases. Examples include the clusters of DLT the adoption of hybrid or new DLT and the use of open source^[¹^].

Clauses 8, 9, 10, and 11 provide the detailed use cases reflecting the digital marketplace, arranging them in the template format for easy comparison. The combination of categories and commentary in this document is designed to help readers reference the relevant classification to their sector as well as discover transferable attributes from other categories that can be applied to their DLT requirements.

The work on this document started with identifying the key themes which have the most DLT activity and inviting use cases in these sectors. This resulted in a first set of sector clusters including Fintech, Supply Chains, Data Provenance and Energy.

PD ISO/TR 3242:2022

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Use cases

Current

Published:

30 Nov 2022