Blockchain — Does your business need it?
Blockchain technology has been getting a lot of attention lately for its industry-disrupting capabilities. As a result, many industries are falling over themselves to try and incorporate blockchain. The increasing popularity of blockchain and cryptocurrency is bringing a lot of opportunities to the business world. But does your business really need it or you just want to be trendy?
Type of Blockchains
First, let me shortly explain a few blockchain types and what will they contribute to you. There are mainly 3 types of Blockchain which are Public, Private and Consortium.
A public blockchain network is completely open and anyone can join and participate in the network. The network typically has an incentivizing mechanism to encourage more participants to join the network. Bitcoin and Ethereum are two of the largest public blockchain networks in production today.
Private blockchain, as its name suggests, is a private property of an individual or an organization. Unlike public blockchain, here there is an in charge who looks after important things such as read/write or whom to selectively give access to read or vice versa. In a private Blockchain, write permissions are kept centralized to one organization. Read permissions may be public or restricted to any degree. An example of a private blockchain is Hyperledger Fabric.
Consortium Blockchains operate under the leadership of a group. As opposed to public Blockchains, they don’t allow any person with access to the Internet to participate in the process of verifying transactions. They are faster (higher scalability) and provide more transaction privacy, mostly used in the banking sector. Corda is an example of this kind.
The right thinking
The first thing you should do is to figure out do you really need a blockchain for your business. Then think about whether blockchain will really fix the problems and which of its features are you going to use to solve them. And last but not least, an answer to the question — “Why?”. Why are you going to use blockchain. Yes, Blockchain is trendy but do not use it when it is not needed.
Evaluate your business needs
Now let’s explain which are the questions you have to answer to find out if blockchain is right for your business. We have prepared 8 questions which will help you with identifying it. You can check the image below.
Which blockchain is the best one?
On this question, I would answer with a question: “For what?”. The different kinds of blockchain are good for different purposes. There is no right answer to this question. Firstly, you should identify what you need to do and which features of a blockchain you are going to use and then you will be able to answer this question.
Conclusion
At GlobalizeIT we support both public and permissioned blockchain solutions and find the right one together with our clients and partners based on the questions we considered above. So in the end, I hope my explanation will help you a bit by choosing the right solution for your business.
So you think you need blockchain after you read the article?
Let’s build something great. Together. Feel free to contact us for further questions at hello@globalizeit.tech
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