Random Observation/Comment #648: Pick a solution to solve your problem. When you treat blockchain like a hammer, then everything looks like a nail (because everything involves data storage, consensus, and retrieval).
Why this List?
When picking a blockchain platform that’s “ledger-appropriate” to your business use case, you likely want to do some due diligence and create a rubric that justifies your business and technical choices to your stakeholders and team. Here are some business factors that might be considered for your platform choice.
See Part 2 for the 30 Blockchain Technical Factors (will update when posted).
Note: This does not represent the opinion of ConsenSys, R3, EEA, Hyperledger, other affiliations I might be involved in, or any particular projects I’ve worked on. I just like lists of 30.
- Main supporting company of the platform – Who is it? Are there many companies supporting the same platform?
- Supporting company’s long term support strategy – Will the company stay around and play a significant role maintaining the code releases? Is it split from the network?
- Supporting company’s financials – Digging deeper into the financial runway and valuation of the supporting company.
- Unique business value proposition – Was this blockchain built specifically for a certain environment to cover specific functional/non-functional requirements?
- Platform’s target market – Does the platform have a clear target market that will directly buy the top of stack dapps and build on top of the platform?
- Platform’s go-to-market plan – What is the approach towards more adoption of the market?
- Volume of Technology vendors – How many companies are building top of stack apps on top of the system?
- Quality of Technology vendors – Which of these companies are reputable and have delivered previous projects or have existing market buy-in?
- Type of Apps released – Are the apps released useful and being used by the market?
- Marketplace saturation – Has the marketplace reached a level of commitment that shows opportunity to join? Is it already saturated?
- Available developers – Is there a strong developer community looking for job opportunities?
- Cost of developers – Are specialized blockchain developers too expensive to hire or too evangelist to join a traditional institution?
- Ease of integration with existing applications – Will these applications connect to existing systems using traditional technologies?
- Marketplace of live dapps – How many dapps are live?
- Roadmap of features – What additional features will be added to the platform?
- Open Source vs Enterprise version compatibility – Are both open source and enterprise versions interoperable?
- Open Source vs Enterprise additional features – What additional features must be purchased or built by the vendors?
- Licensing costs of blockchain layer – How much will the blockchain layer (e.g. node/clients/infrastructure/foundation membership) cost?
- Licensing costs of dapp – How much will the dapp cost? How does the dapp make money in the ecosystem? Will it lock up money within a smart contract by selling tokens or charge a fee within the contract per transaction?
- Upside to building your own dapp vs buying a published one – Is it economically viable to build a dapp and sell it to others in the ecosystem for a pure technology play?
- Support incident management and business continuity – Who is able to provide support at all levels and make sure things work if you adopt a new technology?
- Internal hiring for on-going maintenance – Who do I need to hire within devops or infrastructure to support the system? Is there a conversion opportunity within the institution?
- System integration components – Are there existing components that can be deployed or reused from existing systems?
- Standards support – Does the tech stack align with the institution’s tech policies?
- Enterprise-grade audits – Has the platform gone through enterprise-level audits of the software and backed company for deployment?
- Vendor agnostic – Are there multiple technology providers contributing to the different layers?
- Global testing of security – Are there sufficient whitehat hackers and history of review on the platform in terms of security measures?
- Market valuation – Is there a network with existing value that can be traded?
- Market landscape maturity – Have enough intermediary parties claimed positions within the successful launch of the market?
- Execution with Preferred Vendor – Does my Preferred Vendor (the consultancy most used by your company) suggest this platform for the use cases that might solve our business problems?
~See Lemons Pick a Blockchain
