Gautam Dhameja on Blockchains that Evolve with your Business

From October 30th to November 1st, hundreds of blockchain professionals from industry and academia are joining forces in Athens, Greece at Decentralized 2019 to engage in workshops, talks, and networking. One prominent keynote speaker was Gautam Dhameja, whose talk was titled Blockchains that Evolve with your Business, representing Parity.
Dhameja spoke on the difficulties with typical enterprise blockchain systems:
“General enterprise blockchain systems face many problems when a new change is made, such as a member being added or a parameter being changed. First of all, you want to update the smart contracts and create an oracle for the new system to be connected, then migrate the data from the old smart contracts. Next, because there are so many moving parts, you have to audit and test for functionality, performance, and security. Lastly, deploy with the end product.
Updating an enterprise blockchain is too costly. Changes are a business process disruption. What you want to do in the first place is business process optimization, but that gets disrupted. Things change, but blockchain doesn’t. What about new rules, new parameters, new systems?
It’s really hard to change the blockchains of today. If we divide the implementation of a blockchain into three high-level phases, you do build phase, maintenance, and re-build. Most time estimates are the build, but we don’t talk about maintenance.”
Essentially, complex systems constantly need changes, whether it’s because of a feature request, feedback, or just a new member to the network, but this can be really hard to do due to the immutable nature of blockchains.
Dhameja discusses four pillars for an efficient blockchain:
“Complex systems can be changed fairly easily, but in blockchain, each and every change has an additional cost associated with it to be implemented. The blockchain operating life cycle requires a significant development effort.
To reduce that cost, you must have a governing process to make those changes possible. Blockchains are governed, not administered, so you need efficient on-chain governance. It should be upgradable by design. You should be able to extend the framework as you wish. Finally, every enterprise blockchain integrates with something outside, it’s not the only solution.
These four pillars are needed for efficient blockchains.”
One such efficient implementation is Parity Substrate, which lets you build your own blockchain.
“Parity substrate is the foundation for blockchain innovators. Substrate is an open-source, modular framework for building blockchains.
The first benefit is on-chain governance. Putting information on a Google Doc is one thing, but putting those rules on-chain is entirely different. Substrate has a collection of runtime libraries to upgrade a blockchain.
The second thing is upgradability. The most important thing is to upgrade without hard forks. Forkless upgrades via substrate are possible.
The next one is extensibility. You can connect to external systems easily to create a custom blockchain in minutes.
Finally, the most important thing is dealing with off-chain information. Substrate off-chain workers saves costs by doing everything from the node itself.”
Basically, Parity Substrate has a ton of benefits for developers looking for an efficient implementation. In closing, Dhameja says this:
“If a new entity wants to join an enterprise blockchain, instead of the long, convoluted traditional process, if you use Substrate, the update process has far fewer moving parts. If you don’t want to do audits and migrate data, you don’t have to. Fewer steps means a lower cost.”
