How to identify do you really need Blockchain for your business problem?
Blockhain in the new buzz word in the industry. Now a days, everyone seems so fascinating to apply blockchain in their current business model or want to resolve existing problems using the blockchain technology. But blockchain can not be used in every case. You have to carefully analyse user business problem before utilising this new promising technology.
In this article i will try to cover the basic requirements for the need of Blockchain based solution for a business problem. So lets begin:
Step 1: Define your business problem and try to identify are you trying to remove the intermediaries used for different checks or validation in your business case. If there is no requirement to remove such intermediaries blockchain is not required. But if you are removing these intermediaries you move to the next steps.
Step 2: Identify the assets/data you are going to store/view/share for your business problem. If you are working with digital records/assets move to next step otherwise blockchain based solution is not required in your business problem.
Step 3: Is your use case have requirement of a permanent authoritative record/database of the digital records/asset identified in step 2? If a reliable, trusted, permanent storage of records/assets required move to next step otherwise blockchain is not required.
Step 4: Identify the number of transactions that have to be performed for the successful execution of the business problem solution. If high performance transactions are required blockchain can not do this efficiently. (Public blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum can perform 7–15 transactions per sec and permissioned blockchain like Hyperledger, Corda, quorum blockchain perform upto 1000 transactions (avg. 100–200 only)per sec). But research are still on to improve the number of transactions.
Step 5: Identify the amount of data you have to store as blockchain can not have to capabilities to store the large amount of data yet due to constraints like fixed block size. But research is on to overcome this.Do you want/need to rely on a trusted party? e.g. for compliance or liability reasons (Blockchain may work further research is needed)
Step 6: This is one of the important step. You have to identify is there any value exchange happening in your business problem. If different participants sharing or writing values you have to dig done further to identify roles of these participants before using blockchain.
Step 7: If the participants have the authority to perform write operations on the world state of the database and all participants are known and trusted, than private/permissioned blockchain can provide a solution for your business problem. If participants are not known and trusted than public blockchain can provide the solution for the business problem.
Have a look on the below flowchart to identify which blockchain will suits your purpose.
Ref: Karl Wüst, Arthur Gervais,”Do you need a Blockchain?”
Hope this article will help you identify that you require a blockchain based solution or not. If you are interested in comparative study of different types of blockchain you can have a look on this article:
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