Bitkom_Block: Pay-per-use payments in industry – the perfect blockchain use case?
The last episode of the Bitkom_Block web meeting series of the Blockchain working group of the digital association Bitkom dealt with the topic of pay-per-use models with blockchain. This time, Marcus Hennig from d-fine was the guest expert. The media partner of the web meeting series is BTC-ECHO.
In his presentation, Marcus Henning focused on the advantages of pay-per-use models. For the users of industrial machinery, these include greater flexibility and better capital allocation; for the Crypto Cash owners of the machinery, pay-per-use promises a steady source of income or easier market entry. Such models are particularly suitable for expensive machines in agriculture, medicine and production.
Blockchain enables the automatic and transparent exchange of data and payments between different parties. Especially if other service providers, e.g. insurers and banks, are to be connected to a pay-per-use solution, a decentralised solution makes sense. Because then the usage data of the machines can also be used directly for suitable financing and insurance services.
Through the use of smart contracts, the blockchain automatically triggers a payment settlement depending on the use and usage of the machines. The decisive factor here is that the usage data is fed into the blockchain cleanly and, so to speak, unmanipulable by sensors and encryption mechanisms.
There are then different variants for the payment process. The blockchain can either „trigger“ a transaction in classic payment transactions, e.g. SEPA direct debit, or the use of tokenised e-money or stablecoins takes place directly on-chain. In the future, the digital euro will certainly provide a remedy for such use cases.
Bitkom_Block: What’s coming up
The next Bitkom_Block webmeeting will be about the blockchain technology Polkadot, which has had a brilliant rise and now ranks 5th among blockchains by market capitalisation.
On 17 February (16:00 to 17:00), Bill Laboon, Technical Education Lead at the Web3 Foundation, will give an introduction to Polkadot. The former computer science lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh will focus on Polkadot’s goals (scalability, governance etc.), Polkadot’s architecture (relaychain, parachains etc.) and Polkadot’s features (nominated proof of stake, on-chain governance etc.).
At the kick-off event of the web meeting series on 22 January, the blockchain trends of 2021 were the core topic. Professor Philipp Sandner from the Frankfurt School of Finance, Benjamin Matten from NTT Data and Patrick Hansen from Bitkom dared to look into the crystal ball. The focus was on blockchain trends in the financial sector, starting with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, to the tokenisation of securities and tangible assets, to blockchain-based payment transactions through stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), such as those being promoted by the Chinese government.
