— Teeka Tiwari

Here’s an idea of just how much value smart contracts can unleash for corporate America…

According to Forbes, credit card fraud costs U.S. merchants an estimated $190 billion per year. A smart contract tied to your identity on the blockchain could virtually eliminate credit card fraud.

A report from accounting firm Deloitte suggests smart contracts can save the mortgage, investment banking, and insurance industries as much as a combined $39 billion per year.

A report from global consulting firm McKinsey & Company says smart contracts could save businesses at least $50 billion in business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

Over the next few years, everything from managing property titles, clearing financial trades, and operating day-to-day commerce will happen via some form of smart contract.

And that’s not all.

Smart contracts will enable a new type of commerce called machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce. M2M refers to direct communication between electronic devices.

For example, a smart car will automatically communicate with smart parking meters to pay parking fees.

Computers will use smart contracts to automatically trade resources with other computers. Autonomous vehicles will use smart contracts to trade lane priority and traffic position with each other for money.

We’re not the only ones who think smart contracts are the future. Respected research firm Gartner Group projects 25% of global organizations will use smart contracts by 2022.

The broad use cases for smart contracts means we could see multiple billions more smart contracts than websites.

Here’s why that’s important. Only a fraction of websites are commercial sites that need protection.

On the other hand, virtually all smart contracts will need some form of security verification before they can safely be run. If we throw in M2M commerce, we could see as many as 20 billion smart contracts deployed. That’s because by 2020, it’s expected we’ll have over 20 billion connected devices.”