Let’s BUIDL the Future
Is it a futile, idealist dream or is it the callsign of world-wide movement? Co-written with Michael Coons
BUIDL
/bi-duhl/ : verb
- To deliver a working product to the blockchain & DLT ecosystem.
- It is an intentionally warped colloquialism of the word “build”, that followed suit with the way that to “hold” crypto became “HODL”. Both #HODL and #BUIDL are popular Twitter hashtags.
- “BUIDL is a call to arms for building and contributing to the blockchain ecosystem. BUIDLing involves utilizing smart contracts, beta testing products, using cryptocurrency wallets, and creating anything that could help the blockchain and cryptocurrency fields evolve and expand.” [1]
Blockchain application development, in its short existence, is experiencing some of its most trying challenges.
Take a look back at the progression of blockchain since its marketing peak in 2017. The once overhyped panacea for all has been humbled by the sharp correction following the crash in the early days of 2018. Countless projects launched, billions of dollars were raised, and so much energy tickled the imagination around what Blockchain was going to do to change the relationship between company and customer; employer and employee; country and citizen. However today, many doubt the technology will ever achieve what was promised by the hype [2].
The reality is that for companies that want to integrate with Blockchain, there is a constant challenge to keep up with shifting protocols, unstable infrastructure, and changing APIs. Looking back, it seems like the set of development challenges is very similar to the state of the Internet in 1985. There were gateways connecting independent networks along with ongoing debates over data transfer protocols [3]. Gateways eventually became obsolete when standards were adopted and HTTP became a viable data transfer protocol. Before then, BUIDLing for Internet was difficult. This is precisely where blockchains and DLT is right now. There are dozens of blockchain protocol networks actively BUIDLing and debating over performance, security, and interoperability — Ethereum, EOS, Tron, Hashgraph, Zilliqa, Stellar, Hyperledger, Corda — just to name a few. All of them want your attention — and typically the conversation gets taken over by those with large marketing budgets dropped at conferences, sponsoring hackathons, and designing pretty user interfaces.
We spent some time to sort this confusion out here, through what we call the Web3 Convergence Stack. All this work put toward these projects, yet few DLT projects across the whole stack are effectively usable.
Developers with patience enough to explore the decentralized stack are left with a suboptimal situation: well-funded vendors trip over imprecise language, competing for their attention; all the while, the developers themselves face the constant challenge of dealing with shifting protocols, unstable infrastructure, and changing APIs.
Exploring DLT
From 2019 into 2020, the conversation has been dominated by decentralized finance products hitting the market, new blockchain networks arising, and new blockchain pilots and prototypes. However, non-financial use cases like immutable identity, provenance, record keeping, and event state (some examples: Broccoli, Power Ledger, IdentiCAT), do not enter the conversation or get ranked as “one of the top dapps”. Sometimes, there is little to no incentive for these teams to open up to the rest of the ecosystem. Instead, a vast amount of resources have poured into propping up the mission of digital financial social inclusion for social good — where often the touchy-feely marketing overshadows the realistic ability for any of these hackathon projects to integrate with the web 2.0 stack and existing service providers. Moreover, the technical developments today that get propagated by crypto news networks and traders are cross-chain connectivity solutions or the launch of new blockchain protocol networks [4] [5] [6].
On top of this, enterprise blockchain pilots are quietly underway. For instance, multiple enterprise-level supply chain projects, bank financial products, portfolios, and stablecoins, and government central bank digital backed stablecoins are in development [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]. However, little beyond President Xi’s announcement or Andrew Yang’s allusions to nation-wide DLT-based programs suggest enthusiasm for “pure blockchain” use cases.
What does all this mean for the dream of blockchain developers? Is a mainstream tech stack offering privacy and self-sovereignity preservance not possible? Is oligopoly by consortiums of banks and IGOs an inevitable cycle of development? Does the “decentralized world” exist only in the minds of those developers stuck to the bubbles of devs and gamers in their own little interconnected pockets around the world?
Organizations considering the use of blockchain are probably acting, somewhat, out of fear [15]. Maybe it is fear of being left behind. Maybe it is the fear of remaining competitive in a future multi-blockchain interconnected world. To make this more realistic, consider an antiquated system like DNS.
DNS is a supply/demand market managed by ICANN, an organization that controls address distribution and top-level domain assignments (.com, .io, .tv, etc). ICANN has done an outstanding job to manage the IP address space for decades. Except, this system has allowed for rent-seekers or middlemen that charge fees just to “register” your domain. There are also middlemen to protect the identity and contact information associated with a domain — kind of like extortion to maintain your privacy. These entities exist because the DNS system is not trivial and requires interfacing with a network of servers speaking specialized protocols to determine how to turn “https://buidlhub.com” into a reachable network address.
Suppose an alternative to DNS emerges — one where this supply/demand market was more fluid (you could imagine Namebase). Perhaps this alternative lowers the barriers to register and remaining private is not so difficult or expensive. This alternative may not be controlled by any one organization or DB admin, cannot be shut down, and cannot be changed or manipulated except by the domain owners. Perhaps, this system even allows the open trading of domains, without middlemen taking a cut. However, this new DNS alternative is implemented with smart contracts— something with which your organization has no experience. Moreover, the project is run by a distributed team of engineers in a circle of cyberpunks. You blew off the technology years before, during an early prototype and pilot phase, a time when other companies spent time and money learning about them and implementing some test projects. While this was way ahead of time, the current circumstances present you with a serious problem: how do you get your domain registered on this new system before someone else grabs it? The itch of first-mover advantage is still responsible for the urgency and fear driving a lot of DLT exploration…but why don’t we see products emerging that have blockchain ingredients?
Most blockchain exploration is based in fear— the fear of missing out. Companies want to be ready for a future DLT world, but are turned off by the wars of competing attention fought by protocol networks and the frequency of crypto price manipulation from traders—and want nothing to do with it. So they choose “pluggable”, permissioned networks like Corda, Quorum, or Hyperledger instead.
See further explanation here.
Integration Pain Points
Blockchain integration sucks.
When a project attempts to use blockchain, they are faced with this minefield of barriers to entry — the realities of working at the bleeding edge. In Deloitte’s 2019 Blockchain survey, the authors show that the largest challenge for Blockchain adoption has been integration. Why is it so difficult?
The blockchain tech stack and protocols are completely different from those in traditional web or app development. Imagine replacing a fundamental protocol like HTTP in every browser and mobile device with a unique version of HTTP, each saying that they offer the fastest internet browsing speeds — how long would that take? Who would know how to do it?
If there were multiple forms of HTTP and standard internet protocols, it would bring challenges for non-tech companies, or those with limited IT staff, since it would require expensive, specialized expertise. This is precisely what integrating blockchain is like today. Integration is daunting and requires specialized skills that are in high demand — with 14 jobs for every 1 engineer in 2018!
The primary issue is the up-front cost required to prototype something that may or may not even solve a business need. On the surface, blockchain sounds like it can do anything — in the same way, that “Cloud” and “AI/ML” will be able to solve everything. But blockchain has very specific use cases that are not fully grasped until diving into the technology to appreciate where it can actually add the most value. Huge multinational consulting firms like IBM, Accenture, Deloitte and blockchain firms like Consensys are all gunning to get the big enterprises to adopt some version of blockchain. This creates yet another disparity for the very part of the business ecosystem blockchain intended to help: the under-served. The scrappy startups that want to leapfrog over larger, slow-moving competitors to gain market advantage are left with lengthy or stagnant production runways just to figure out how to use the technology — all while competing for the same blockchain experts to get it to market faster.
There has to be a better way to integrate.
Events and Serverless
While all this is going on, trends in software continue to evolve. One such trend is Serverless — a technology aimed at decomposing large applications into smaller, single-purpose functions that can be scaled and distributed across thousands of machines (yes, servers, but servers YOU don’t manage). Platforms like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Azure Automation are all geared towards turning monolith architectures into on-demand infrastructure that scales to serve individual parts of a larger application. The most common way to architect Serverless infrastructure is to employ an event-driven programming model.
Think about your mobile phone for a moment. You receive a text. It says, “hey honey, can you pick up milk on your way home?”
What do you do? You read the message, interpret its meaning, and respond in some way — hopefully, picking up milk to avoid a confrontation!
This trigger-condition & effect-action is exactly what event-driven programming is — except instead of the actor being a person, it is a piece of software. More specifically, this software comes in the form of a small function that gets deployed into this Serverless ecosystem that responds on-demand. What is more interesting about this is that the source of the event is not important. The software does not care where the event came from — the application is coded to do something specific in response to its input. So why couldn’t the input be sourced from blockchain — the current state of the chain and the smart contract events that get executed? And why couldn’t the function call out to blockchain?
BUIDLing an event bridge
BUIDLHub EventFlow provides exactly this kind of input-sourcing and functionality. It is a low-code/no-code app that creates a bridge between DLTs and traditional web infrastructure, using these abstract signals or on-chain events. This means that traditional web development trends, like Serverless, can instantly take advantage of blockchain applications and state without needing to deal with the challenges around workforce supply, or the integration pain points addressed earlier.
This means that any organization wanting to experiment with blockchain can use their existing IT infrastructure and staff to either speed up their go-to-market launch or fail faster knowing whether blockchain is going to be applicable to their business needs.
Our vision is to make it way easier for organizations, teams, and individuals to discover where blockchain can actually provide depth to their applications. At the same time, we believe that blockchain examples like a DNS replacement are real — and we want to ensure that anyone who can understand it, can afford to integrate with on-chain solutions now, not when it is too late.
Try EventFlow for FREE at www.buidlhub.com to dramatically reduce the time on blockchain-based event integration. Subscribe to the BUIDLHub email on the website for exclusive access to product launches and news.
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