When we talk about trending technologies of the decade, no doubt, Blockchain technology is one of them. Initially focused on transaction-related activities in the financial place, Blockchain platforms are more in demand for developing decentralized applications or dApp development. Through the applications of decentralized apps, businesses have explored Blockchain technology’s capability, and maybe this is the prime reason that Blockchain platforms are increasing day by day.
These Blockchain platforms are development platforms of blockchain-based applications. It can be permissioned or permissionless.
Many emerging issues can be solved with distributed ledger technology of Blockchain. It is the increase in connection of the society that is responsible for this emergence. It also helps to address real-world business problems. Blockchain platforms help to expand the field of domains. When considering building a blockchain, you must choose the right blockchain project development platform. This blog will discuss what things are to be considered to choose a Blockchain development platform. But before that, we will briefly discuss what is Blockchain?
What is Blockchain?
For the last ten years, blockchain is not a new term for anyone following the financial industry, especially banking, cryptocurrency, or investment. So, what is Blockchain? As we know, Blockchain is not a very new concept; however, its recent popularity increased from 2008 onwards. Blockchain was combined with other computing concepts and several other technologies to revolutionize the modern concept of cryptocurrency. Instead of a central repository, Blockchain encourages peer-to-peer electronic transactions utilizing cryptographic mechanisms and that too also without any trusted third party in between. In a single phrase, it is a distributed, decentralized, and public ledger.
What are the things to consider while choosing a Blockchain platform
Application security demand
We can find Blockchain in three different solutions –
- Centralized
- Decentralized
- Hybrid
With a centralized solution, you will get single authority controls for the network. In the case of a decentralized solution, you will get the work, and the data will be shared throughout the network. While the third major solution is hybrid, where the centralized solution forms a connection to the decentralized network.
So, if your application demands private information like addresses, business documents, names, and so on from the users, then you must completely avoid a decentralized solution. Because in this case, the data will be publicly visible online. But if your application wants to promote transparency, then you will have to store the appropriate data on a public chain or centralized solution so that it is easily accessible.
Not necessarily all information needs to be stored on a Blockchain network. Instead, you can exchange information one-to-one, excluding Blockchain. Furthermore, if it is not essential to permanently store data for your business, you can keep it off-chain.
Application Scalability
A blockchain framework is a database that can potentially store a huge amount and any information from an application. However, they are actually ‘distributed’ and change their scalability. But it is often very difficult to retrieve important information from all the available nodes of a growing distributed system. In Blockchain technology, latency is an important factor that signifies the time taken to find and route information between nodes. At the same time, the effort needed for this purpose is known as computation overheads. Distributed ledger technology or DLT is used for this purpose which is not Blockchain. The speed, in this case, is not constant and varies on time.
These factors usually depend on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG), which is basically a series of interwoven and interdependent Blockchain. A DAG blockchain is a good choice if your application doesn’t need many queries and detailed permissions.
Accessibility requirements of your application
Every application supports certain goals of people. So, finding out accessibility requirements for users are very important. In the DLT space, user interfaces come in the form of apps, desktop nodes, and webs. It is also necessary to protect user data by avoiding the storage of unencrypted data. Modern API works wonder in this case. Some of the most popular APIs are Java, Python, JavaScript, and Go.
It is also necessary to increase the usability of the application by using generalizable systems. This is because they don’t require highly developed hardware and don’t demand lengthy training to become useful. Also, the geographical needs of users are another vital criterion while designing the blockchain project. Once you keep these things in mind, you can easily plan out the accessibility requirements of your users.
Permissioned vs. Permission-less
A blockchain development platform should be chosen depending on the use case. In this context, we must mention about the permission models of Blockchain. Based on the permission model, Blockchain networks can be categorized into two types:
Permission model: If only particular users can publish blocks, it is permissioned. Thus it determines who can publish blocks in the Blockchain network.
Permissionless model: If anyone can publish a new block in the Blockchain network, it is permissionless. It is like the public internet, where anyone can participate.
In your use case, if you need to have all your participants authorized before participating in the network, then the permissioned model is ideal for you. But here, the permissioned model/network needs identity verification/authorizations services known as notaries. These services can be either centralized or decentralized. Now you need to choose what is suitable for you.
Developer availability
There are many development frameworks available in the market, which I have discussed in my previous blog – To know some of the best Blockchain platforms, please refer to this blog – Top 10 Blockchain platforms you should know. However, you will not get many developers available in the market on most of these technologies. Furthermore, many of these frameworks have their languages created, which makes it even harder to train your existing developer pool.