Why choose a single blockchain when you can be Blockchain Agnostic?
BLOG: Choice is usually a good thing — but when it comes to piloting or implementing blockchain in a commercial setting, so much choice is actually a significant burden.
Kurt Pfluger — 20 February 2018
Blockchain technology is developing at a rapid pace. Where there used to be one or two “leading” public blockchains, there are now scores of blockchains — some public, some private, and some a mix of public-private that are controlled by consortia.
Each kind of blockchain has its pros and cons, offering a broad spectrum of choices depending on how you feel about anonymity vs privacy, openness vs control, speed of transaction approval, and even the environmental impact of how transactions are processed. Dig a little deeper into each individual blockchain, and you’ll find further diversity.
In particular, you’ll find diversity in how different blockchains execute smart contracts. In the same way that a traditional contract has conditions that must be met in order to be executed, so too do smart contracts. When conditions are met and consensus is achieved, then a smart contract is executed. The main difference is that smart contracts are executed autonomously by code, which means the terms must be significantly more clear-cut — there’s no room for interpretation.
Smart contracts are a widely accepted instrument in enabling trust in a trustless ecosystem. But in the absence of broadly-agreed templates, no two smart contracts are alike; and they’re all tied to specific languages that working for specific blockchains.
So how do you choose the right blockchain?
Choosing a single blockchain is difficult.
Choice is usually a good thing. But when it comes to piloting or implementing blockchain in a commercial setting, so much choice is actually a significant burden. And with blockchain on an upward growth trajectory, it’s not going to get any easier anytime soon.
What is certain is that choosing to work with a single blockchain is risky. If the evolution of the Internet has taught us nothing else, it’s that early stage market leaders can easily be surpassed by later entrants (sorry CompuServe, GeoCities and AltaVista, we now have Google).
Change is the only constant. Investing in development and smart contracts on a single blockchain now, means that you may find yourself undertaking an expensive and time-consuming project to repeat the process in the near future.
And ultimately, the specific blockchain underpinning your decentralized apps is less important that their ability to serve your business’ needs, and your ability to get that app to market quickly and cost-effectively. Analysis paralysis will only slow you down.
Instead, it’s critical that you look for a solution that mitigates risk, offers some element of future-proofing, and offers you the flexibility of working with more than just a single blockchain.
The advantages of blockchain-agnosticism
We believe that the answer lies in a blockchain-agnostic platform for decentralized app development.
We believe that blockchains will rise and fall, and that there will be greater fragmentation before we see consolidation along vertical use case lines. And we believe that ultimately, decentralized apps will rely on the execution of multiple smart contracts, across multiple blockchains.
In short, there isn’t going to be one clear-cut “winning blockchain” you can select for decentralized app development. Instead, we believe that the best way to future-proof your investment is to take a blockchain-agnostic approach, building decentralized apps on a platform that lets you interact with any blockchain.
We believe in this so firmly that we’ve built our platform this way: integrating with all blockchain networks, and giving you the flexibility to quickly build decentralized apps with whichever blockchain meets your needs.
When your app needs to interact with other blockchains, you already have the inbuilt capabilities to do so — even in a competitive situation when you can’t be told which blockchain it is. And rather than forcing you to deal with all the different development languages, we’ve simplified smart contract creation so you can use natural language expressions to automatically generate code.
As your business’ and industry’s use of blockchain and smart contracts evolves, you have the ability to quickly respond to changing conditions — whether creating new smart contracts, or interacting with entirely new blockchains.
Getting to market faster — and staying apace with it
Your business’ needs will drive your decentralized app development. Taking a platform-driven, blockchain-agnostic approach ensures that you continue to focus on the commercial needs and benefits, without getting caught up in the hype of one blockchain versus another.
In a highly competitive market with a rapidly tech landscape, the flexibility and future-proofing of a blockchain-agnostic approach may well be the deciding factor between leading and following. It’s not just a race to getting to market up to 45x faster than your competitors — it’s also about being able to respond to changing business and technical conditions at that same rapid pace.
Kurt Pfluger
Chief Strategy Officer
ww.crowdmachine.com
To register for Crowd Machine’s whitelist — click here.
