Page 23 - Insurance Times December 2021

components can get triggered to handicap the process O Rating on a scale of 1 to 5, the severity of both the
partially or completely. above factors

We looked at the following two components during O The impact of these setbacks on the insurance
industry.
the study.
(1) Severity aspect in terms of Technological design O Core requirements for a business Blockchain.
(2) Severity aspect in terms of scalability, energy O Network-specific conditions for using Blockchain
consumption and performance triggering elements technology in the organization?
Responses of Industry experts O Cost efficiency of using Blockchain on large scale.
The questions posed to were centered on finding out answers Blockchain has huge reliability on the technological design
to the following questions as shown in table 1 below which is directly determined by the coding that is done and
the programming language is used for the same. Any coding
Table 1: Questions put to industry
flaw can puncture the functionality which further can create
experts a security threat.

O Usage of Blockchain technology in the organization
Scalability, Energy Consumption, and
O Process for which usage was done?
Performance
O Recognition of block in a Blockchain approach.
Unlike the traditional systems at present, the number of
O Restrictions in keeping any particular type of records transactions that could be handled per second is extremely
in a Blockchain.
low as compared to traditional systems. The computational
O Scalability as an issue in Blockchain. power required to validate a new block is high.
O Issues faced by the organization in scalability.
On average it can take from a few seconds to several minutes
O Solutions to the problem of scalability
for a transaction to complete depending on the capacity of
O Steps has your company taken to check the same the network. Since the data is replicated in this process on
O Challenges faced in Blockchain adoption in the each network node, every node must have a leveled capacity.
organization. These nodes consume a high amount of energy and require
O Limitations in technological design and impact on the such powerful hardware that is extremely expensive. See
overall industry. Table 2 below for trigger outcomes.

Table 2: Outcomes of triggers causing possible disruption

Factors Technological Design Scalability, Energy Consumption, and Performance
1 Weak coding invites hackers. They can intercept the Every node in the network has a separate limit to
communication channels of the Blockchain. storage capacity. Blockchain requires a large amount
of data to be stored.
Sync between the peers is not possible without them
leveling up.
2 Bugs in the protocols can hamper the functioning. Every transaction when first carried out is first
Protocols in Blockchain are complex programs. broadcasted to all nodes. This process consumes a
slot of network resource which as a result increases
the propagation delay
3 Bugs in Smart Contract similar to bugs in protocols Blockchain is a power-hungry model. It requires nodes
can result in compromising of data. to be able to support networks with powerful systems.
4 Flawed code from developers can result in If a single party owns more nodes they can attempt
unprotected consensus algorithms. to disrupt the network.

Severity assigned based on data received from industry experts who were respondents on 5 pointer scale (For business
delivery in Insurance sector). See figure 1 and figure 2 below:

The Insurance Times, December 2021 23