52  Blockchain

The following are some of the use cases of smart contacts and how they

can disrupt the business landscape through automation by removing any

manual intervention.

Smart contracts are like any legal contracts but are defined through a

software code. They are a set of conditions recorded on a blockchain that

gets triggered automatically with self-executed actions when these pre-

defined conditions are met. Some of the use cases are as follows:

• Supply chain contracts

• Music royalties

• Insurance claim payout

• Equity trading

• Mortgage drawdown

• Trade finance.

Dynamic registry

You might have already realised that the blockchain technology niche is

a distributed ledger called DLT, which is immutable but depending on

Table 2.3  Examples of crypto by market capitalisation

Crypto name

Crypto sign

Price in USD ($)

Market capitalisation

Circulating supply

(volume in units)

Bitcoin

BTC

39,610

$744b

18.77m

Ethereum

ETH

2,638

$310b

117m

Tether

USDT

1

$61.9b

61.9b

Binance Coin

BNB

333.7

$56b

168m

Cardona

ADA

1.32

$42.6b

32b

Ripple

XRP

0.74

$34.6b

46b

USD Coin

USDC

1

$27.4b

27.4b

Dogecoin

DOGE

0.20

$26.7b

130.6b

Polkadot

DOT

18.36

$18b

980m

Uniswap

UNI

22.92

$13.4b

587m

Binance USD

BUSD

1

$12b

12b

Chainlink

LINK

23.56

$10.4b

443m

Bitcoin Cash

BCH

548

$10.3b

18.8m

Litecoin

LTC

142

$9.5b

66.7m

Solana

SOL

33.75

$9.2b

272.6m

All data is as of writing on 2 August 2021.