Answer to outdo the challenges of Blockchain technology - Part 2

Image source: premiergazette

The pace with which we beat the drums for the most trans-formative technology, surpasses the pace with the ability to deliver to the expectations. No technology is handy, they all have their own challenges and their own specific solutions.

Be it Mobile, IoT, Big Data or Blockchain; the solution for their challenges is/was never found with snapping of fingers. It takes time, and efforts to adopt the best solution from the possible solutions. For this reason, it is not the fault of technology or the people who are putting their endless efforts.

In my previous post, I had shared the top 5 challenges of the blockchain technology - Integration with existing systems, initial investment, gaining customer trust, expertise and setting up the labs. In this post, I am sharing my ideas on the possible solutions to outdo the challenges of Blockchain:

Budgeted initial investment:

Investments are always subjected to market risks; blockchain is new and hence all the risks should be calculated first before making an investment.

It is advisable to keep a low or middling budget, with time and market analysis of the Blockchain technology, the budget can be revised. Looking at the following image, we can see that the investment in Blockchain has and is gradually increasing with every passing year.

 Image source: ei.marketwatch

Train existing experts:

‘If you have the passion to learn, you will never cease to grow’. It is very obvious that experts with experience on new technologies prove to be costly to hire. The cost-effective solution is to train your own experts for Blockchain.

It is not only beneficial for the experts who get to learn a new technology but even for the company because such experts will prove to be the best resources for the future coming technologies as well.

Platform solutions:

At the initial stages, when working on new technology the best practice is to use open source platforms; for the obvious reason of ‘cost’. Following are a few platforms that can be tried for the initial time period.

Public Ethereum:

This is an open-source platform which drew many Fortune 500 companies. Among its gains of Blockchain, is the ability to trade assets without any third-party involvement and smart contract support. It uses extractors to achieve concurrence needed for a transaction before it gets added to the blockchain ledger.

Quorum: 

This is also an open source but private ledger platform which unites Ethereum and a private ledger which may foretell the future of blockchain. It identifies the need for a ‘private’ ledger for cases like financial transactions, along with maintaining a compatibility with public ledgers.

To keep and maintain the privacy, entities with ‘proof of authority’ can only access the transaction information.

Hyperledger Fabric: 

This too is an open source but private ledger platform for blockchain framework implementation, designed with a modular architecture. This modular architecture facilitates an approach to design complex applications and unify them with different players.

Hyperledger Fabric allows the assigning permissions to payers to specific nodes i.e. restricted access. Thus, assigning specific permissions for specific smart contracts and allowing nodes to play individual roles.

R3 Corda: 

R3 Corda is a private ledger Java-based platform, which is designed specifically for financial services domain. Compared to the other ledgers, agreement in Corda is reached based on validation and uniqueness i.e. verification of the signature and selling an asset only once.

Talking about smart contracts, it provides legal matter-of-facts by establishing a connection between the contract and the language of the actual contract and feasibility.

Blockchain is growing and gaining recognition as a game-changer in many industry domains, mainly finance. This year, we will more implementations and advances in the blockchain technology. Ethereum, Quorum, Hyperledger Fabric. R3 Corda along with smart contracts are some of the solutions that can hold out hope for the future of the industries, particularly the finance industry.