Clemens Wan is a Solution Architect at Consensys. He writes lists of 30 seelemons.com.
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 (for technical considerations, read 30 Blockchain Platform Technical Factors).
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 ongoing 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 white-hat 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 your preferred vendor (the consultancy most used by your company) suggest this platform for the use cases that might solve our business problems?
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