By Srinivas Mahankali, Chief Business Officer, Blockedge
Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are revolutionizing many sectors and rewriting rules by facilitating unprecedented collaboration between ecosystem participants across diverse domains and functional areas. While this may seem utopian, there are many challenges and landmines that can derail implementation at any stage.
Being a relatively new technology paradigm, blockchain enables new business models that correspond to cutting-edge approaches in corporate interactions involving distributed and decentralized databases. For example, smart contracts can be leveraged to automate transactions between participants and record asset ownership as well as transfers of whitelisted identities through the lifecycle of the corresponding assets.
Emerging cryptographic methods facilitate varying levels of privacy, security, and confidentiality to be built into blockchain-based applications. If executed well, these cryptographic safeguards help democratize decision-making in shared blockchain networks, facilitating faster interactions with much lower costs over a period of time.
Needless to say, organizations face a difficult decision when adopting blockchain into their business operations, as it requires careful consideration of potential use cases and a deep assessment of whether or not these use cases are sustainable. In addition, organizations need to consider the pros and cons of public vs. private blockchain, a topic which remains heavily debated in the community.
Such decisions often fall in the hands of influential and mighty organizations, which play a significant role in scaling blockchain platforms.
Blockchain can of course be a boon to the customers who can get authentic products with verifiability of claims, credentials, and transport conditions. In addition, it enables smaller innovative participants to play on equal footing to their well-established competitors by leveraging the trust offered by the system.
While blockchain projects primarily depend on the larger players to be kickstarted, the benefits are disproportionately in favor of the smaller players. In other words, the interests of larger players and smaller players are typically not well aligned, which leads to severe starting trouble. This brings into play several issues originating from the capabilities and the financial and technological bandwidth of larger players who wish to protect their turf and creates entry barriers for others. Governance takes an important role here — unable to offer an above-the-board approach, many a consortium falter in the early stages of their lifecycle.
This is where industry consortia and ecosystem associations with strong financial bandwidth and great ethos like MOBI have a great role to play as they stand to mitigate many of the negative tendencies that can derail the growth of blockchain adoption in their respective industries.
Blockedge is a reliable and robust Blockchain as a Service platform with a host of service offerings across the blockchain implementation cycle. It has been envisioned as a tool to counter many of the above-mentioned shortcomings. Blockedge offers smooth and easy ramps to facilitate any participant to onboard consortia and leverage blockchain applications for trusted, transparent, and high-value interactions with their customers.