4 questions to ask yourself if you are going to start a project in blockchain

Hi there!

We usually talk about how to use blockchain, specifically Hyperledger Fabric.

But why and when should we consider using it?

I have four crucial questions for you, which we will expand on.

1. What Problem Are You Solving?

When you start a blockchain project, you must identify a real-world problem that aligns with the strengths of blockchain—decentralization, transparency, immutability, and security.

Evaluate if your project leverages these features to address the identified need effectively.

Successful blockchain initiatives begin with a clear problem statement and a justification for why blockchain is the best way to provide the best product.

Otherwise, the technical challenge may not be worth the effort, and the project will fail.

If it’s hard to justify the use of blockchain, high chances are that you don’t need it in the first place.

2. Who Are Your Users and Stakeholders?

Understanding your users is vital for your project.

• How will they interact with the network?

• Will they have their own identity?

• Will they interact with the organization that uses blockchain instead?

You see, all of these questions are crucial to build the perfect architecture and solution.

Usually, in permissioned blockchain, blockchain projects start with only one organization because it’s already hard to get the concepts, so let’s not talk about true decentralization.

But keeping the users in mind will allow you to think clearly about the problem, maybe, in 3 months you realize you won’t use blockchain for your data, but rather as a notary, or to store hashes for verification in other organizations.

Changing the use case as you know more about your project and blockchain it’s acceptable, trust your instincts.

3. How Will You Ensure Security and Compliance?

I’m from Europe, we have the famous GDPR law that needs to ensure that personal data and critical data (e.g. health) can be erased upon user’s request.

I’m not sure about the rest of the countries, but this is one of the reasons most data can’t be written directly on-chain.

So, in this situation, you have two options:

1. Write personal data in private data collections.

2. Store personal data off-chain and share it on-demand. Storing only the hash on the blockchain.

Both of the solutions store the hash of the data on-chain. One could argue that the hash needs to have a nonce not to be able to be identified and back-tracked.

4. What Is Your Technological Foundation and Expertise?

If you can answer the previous three questions positively, you are ready to start a blockchain project.

What you need now is the technical knowledge to execute the project.

You have two tasks that need to be simultaneously tackled:

1. Building the product

2. Getting more organizations to onboard on your network

The more organizations your network has, the more value your network will have.

A proof of concept is usually the way to go when you want to test the technology and capabilities.

So, you need someone who can create a network and develop the chaincode and the API to build the backend (this is what I do for a living); this role is a mix of a DevOps Engineer and a Backend engineer

You need a front-end developer to build an application that you can use to interact with the network.

The frontend application will be the application you will show to your stakeholders and possible partners.

If you need to spin up a network fast and you know Kubernetes, I recommend you to use the bevel-operator-fabric: https://github.com/hyperledger/bevel-operator-fabric

If you want to onboard organizations, and the organizations have minimal knowledge, you can use hlf-easy to remove the complexity on deploying peers on bare-metal, which is excellent for PoCs: https://github.com/kfsoftware/hlf-easy

Regards.

-- David Viejo