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When it comes to consumer-facing businesses, such as the gaming industry or any ecommerce site, security presents a challenge. Aside for compliance requirements, businesses put it in place in order to protect themselves as well as their customers. Yet password and multi-step authentication requirements hinder consumer activity, slow down transaction times, and create bottlenecks to growth.
Plenty of online resources, like this one, offer advice to consumers on how to improve their digital security. Don’t reuse passwords, create long passwords, use two-factor authentication, don’t share. These are all great tips. Yet, studies on consumer behavior and passwords reveal a frightening truth:
“Nearly 90% of [consumers] surveyed felt like their current password management and use habits were secure, but over half of the same people admitted to using the same exact password across multiple websites. What’s worse is that 11% used the same password on every single account they had in their name,” according to one source.
The problem is, human — especially consumer — behavior and “traditional” cybersecurity requirements are like oil and water. Security creates natural bottlenecks to ensure a transaction’s validity. Online consumers want convenience and speedy transactions, otherwise they’d head over to a shopping plaza with their checkbooks or cash in hand. What can be done?
Blockchain technology brings inherently secure features to otherwise relatively insecure activities — even activities that traditionally have no relationship with security or, at best, a fraught relationship with security. Better yet, blockchain gamification solutions goes beyond creating transparency and trust amongst consumers and players and preventing abuse and scams. Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) can at once inject security into a gaming ecosystem while also helping drive faster, smarter, and more flexible reward programs for gamers. Let’s explore how.
Improved security
Distributed cloud software is inherently fraud and ransomware-proof by design. This protects an individual consumer or gamer but it also protects the ecosystem: Disrupting a server through a ransomware attack wreaks havoc across a whole ecosystem. Blockchain cybersecurity solutions store data distributed and natively secure digital infrastructure, with encryption capabilities designed to prevent disruption, ransomware, and phishing attacks.
With HeraSoft, each movement or exchange of data is immutably and incorruptibly recorded.
Audit trails are notoriously complicated to create and maintain. For any data tied to consumers, gamers, or their transactions as it relates to the exchange of value, record keeping is all the more critical. Blockchain inherently creates an immutable and incorruptible record of transactions. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean records can’t be corrected. It just means the original record and the correction will both exist, eliminating the possibility of fraud or of recorded data simply going “missing.”
Increased transparency
Blockchain-based technology provides a shared and single version of the truth. The inherent benefit of an immutable, incorruptible data set related to transactions or access increases transparency and trust. This can be an incredible boon or differentiator for a consumer facing business or game provider.
Enhanced efficiency
This is where things get exciting. Using blockchain technology, businesses can facilitate faster transactions using digital currency and automated smart contracts. This means that using blockchain technology goes beyond improving security; it facilitates the gamification of certain types of consumer transactions. Here are some ideas:
- Contests & Sweepstakes: When winners of contests and sweepstakes earn tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) they can, for example, sell a contest award to another buyer, which increases the value of the contest. In turn, businesses can be sure the person who presents a given token earns the reward (and no one else) because the ownership of the token and any transference will be indelibly stamped in the blockchain code.
- Loyalty Programs: At present, loyalty programs are generally use them or lose them type programs. This doesn’t necessarily benefit the business or the consumer. By injecting blockchain technology into the acquisition and transference of loyalty rewards, businesses not only improve access security, they lubricate and gamify their rewards programs.
- Leaderboards, Points & Badges: Using NFTs for in-game purchases allows games and businesses to delegate ownership of a badge or “score” to the consumer or a user/gamer. This means that users actually own the badge rather than the company that issued it. For example, if you catch a pokemon, it’s yours that you can sell it. The ownership of the pokemon has an added layer of security, but now it also has added value in a new market.
The same logic can apply to Rewards Programs, such as in the hospitality industry, or discounts and coupons. In other words, using blockchain for security solutions in consumer-facing industries not only satisfies the need for improved security solutions, it improves the overall consumer experience by modifying and intensifying loyalty and consumer reward programs.
Learn more about how we can help
HeraSoft’s next generation software offers a variety of products and services to improve enterprise logistics management and cybersecurity.
- HeraVault™ offers distributed cloud storage with built-in replication, error correction and restoration capabilities.
- HeraFlow™, is an AI-Powered threat analysis system for fast and accurate threat data monitoring perfect for high-volume workloads and enterprise-level SOC’s.
- HeraPass™, with inherently fraud proof design, helps businesses innovate user management in IoT environments by achieving the anonymization and encryption of highly-sensitive data.
- HeraStamp™ proof-stamps mission critical data to permanent data stores and can help with data integrity in, for example, ecommerce settings.
