Blockchain Beyond the Hype Framework — Exposed

Lean Into Blockchain works to educate others about blockchain technology and talk through use cases that are relevant for them. A great way to test your understanding of the technology (which there is always more to learn), is to try and validate a use case — does a blockchain solution make sense for the problem at hand?

Leveraging the World Economic Forum’s white paper entitled Blockchain Beyond the Hype: A Practical Framework for Business Leaders, we thought we’d run a few use cases through and come out the other side enlightened by the framework’s wisdom. With these 11 questions — all answers would be revealed!

Well, in participating in this exercise, something became clear: for those that have thrown this framework over the fence as the reference for how to determine if a use case is valid, a more thorough review is recommended. For context, we took two use cases through the framework: the human donor milk supply chain and CryptoKitties. The big challenges we see in question form:

1. What about ANY supply chain use case? Questions A & B throw every supply chain management related application out the window (including the donor milk use case). If Walmart is doing it in production and IBM is piloting with major food suppliers around the world, we cannot ignore the potential for faster recall times and IoT functionality to ensure providence and quality. It’s time to admit that while we haven’t solved the “oracle problem,” or reliance on an off-chain source of truth, we are beyond it being a non-starter for blockchain use cases.
2. Can you really trust anyone? Trust is touched on in both questions F & I and while it can’t hurt to have all entities on your blockchain network known and “trusted” (i.e. think of donor banks and hospitals — both reputable entities with aligned interests), the whole point of blockchain is that it takes trust out of the equation. Just as the Ethereum network must protect against bad actors, so too should any consortium of businesses. Corporate corruption is real, and bad actors can be found even within the most trusted organizations. As the old Bitcoin motto goes, “don’t trust, verify.”
3. Can blockchain add value if shared write access isn’t needed? See Question H — If there is only one entity writing transactions to the network, that doesn’t mean that within that same entity multiple write functions aren’t needed (i.e. within a milk donor bank the receptionist needs to verify donor eligibility and the laboratory personnel needs to verify pasteurization of the donations). In addition, transaction validation by other entities in the network is still a value add even if they don’t write transactions to the blockchain. Transaction immutability and visibility might be even more relevant when only one entity is writing to the blockchain.

While these kinds of frameworks provide interesting thought experiments, it’s important to critically assess each potential use case and the ecosystem in which it lives. Each individual blockchain offers different functionalities. These systems are also evolving at such a rapid pace, that our group has found that a general “blockchain” framework doesn’t provide the level of analytical rigor we had hoped for.

If you are in the Seattle area and looking to apply these frameworks to your real world challenges — come to the next Women in Blockchain — Seattle Meetup and jam on these ideas with a group of phenomenal women and allies in the space.