Among the world fastest growing companies today is Uber and Airbnb, two companies whose business model enable people to rent assets from each other. In the recent past, the sharing economy industry has seen explosive growth with a report by Juniper Research estimating that the revenues from the sector will reach 40.2 billion in 2022, up from $18.6 billion in 2017.
According to a similar report by Statista, the number of adult sharing economy users in the U.S will reach 86.5 million by 2021, up from 44.8 million in 2016. However, with the entrance of the blockchain technology in the industry, there is a high likelihood that the growth will be much faster. In general, the blockchain technology seeks to eliminate the inefficiencies that come with intermediaries by …show more content…
The traditional centralized solutions such as Uber, Facebook, eBay, and Airbnb are prone to hackers, and almost all of them have had instances of major data breaches.
For instance, last year, Uber disclosed that hackers had accessed personal information of 57 million riders and drives from its platform in 2016 prompting the company to pay them $100,000 as ransom money. Airbnb, on the other hand, has also been faced with multiple instances of data breaches with the biggest attack making the platform disappear momentarily back in 2016. In a recent incident, hackers hijacked accounts of top rated users and used them to book stays in the homes of hosts that they would then burglarize.
In a blockchain driven solution, hackers would never be able to access users' accounts let alone manipulate them to give a false identity. So far, the blockchain technology provides the best answer to identity verification meaning that those using the blockchain-powered sharing economy platform are guaranteed of the identity of their