The buzzword of the year, blockchain is becoming an exciting technology for businesses to explore. However, its implementation requires solid knowledge, technical background and a serious consideration which may pose as a challenging task between all the hype. We've got you covered!
To help you identify a good use case that would motivate your team to commence an initiative within your organization, we've prepared a short guideline, covering the most important aspects that need to be taken into a consideration before fully committing to your blockchain project.
At this moment, businesses are still at the early stages of blockchain adoption. However, the technology has matured to the point that the big ideas require some sort of materialization. This is why 2018 is definitely the year to dig in the technology even deeper, kick off with Minimal Viable Products and test them to see if they make sense for the future of your business.
And, as chief evangelist at Circle stated for business.com:
“Blockchain will operate in the background. Users may not even know they're using it. But they'll appreciate the benefits of it, such as privacy and fast payments.”
Why does decentralization even matter?
We live in an ever more connected world, where every device we own has an access to the Internet. But, all of our data architecture is client-based and centrally-stored on one device or a cloud. This raises the question whether they are protected against any form of corruption, external or internal, man-made or machine failure, on purpose or by accident. Compared to traditional ledgers, where all of your company`s information sits in one place, blockchain represents a network of trusted computers, called nodes, that maintain collective, consensus-based system to manage, transact, verify and validate data blocks.
What is blockchain technology stack comprised of?
If Internet is the foundational technology layer, blockchain can be described as the driving force for the new generation of Internet. Its technical backbone has the ability to form and reach consensus among different parties via algorithmic software, bringing trust in peer-to-peer transactions without middleman. From a technical point of view, its innovation relies on three concepts — peer-to-peer cryptography, distributed consensus and random mathematical challenge.
Is blockchain the right solution for your company?
Blockchain architecture has the potential to simplify the business operations for all parties involved. However, different businesses have different requirements. To successfully deploy blockchain into your organization, you should firstly define the actual issues in your current operational processes and strive to get a comprehensive understanding of your target customer or, better say their problem you wish to solve. Further, you should evaluate the practical potential blockchain carries for your organization and its commercial applications. These questions might help:
- Does your business venue require standardization?
- Do all of your stakeholders use the same data format?
- Do you all agree upon the relevant rules and roles of business processes?
- What aspects of data communication does your protocol cover?
From an idea to MVP
Blockchain is a step towards building a more independent, peer-to-peer system and can become a unified protocol that a company or consortium would use to write and read data. To really understand its benefits for your organization, we advise you to start small, choose a point problem and deploy a Minimal Viable Product, which will help you understand a particular blockchain solution in detail and, help you evaluate whether this is a direction you should pursue. In other words, MVP is the most basic version of a product, helping you find out if its valuable enough for your organization to pursue, but we will get back to this particular topic in our future blog posts.
What is more, industry research reports suggest that over 85% new product fail, which is a reason good enough for you to get your project right! Testing a prototype will help you learn about the product, its execution and create something of a real value based on feedback, rather than investing a lot of time and money before determining whether it is beneficiary.
And, don’t forget — great blockchain consultants and developers are out there, but are still a rare breed! Need advice? We can help.
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