Zaki Manian is the founder of Skuchain, a startup seeking to bring cryptographic trust to the supply chain. In this opinion piece, Manian argues that Hyperledger offers the best development model for the permissioned blockchain industry, and that attempts to use public networks for business-to-business use cases are perhaps misguided. The nascent business-to-business permissioned ledger industry is moving rapidly from pilots to real product development and deployment. But as this novel application space opens up, it is important for technologists to start answering hard questions about what software development processes will provide the blockchain layer of these applications stacks. The permissioned ledger industry proposes to build a trustworthy and scalable infrastructure for the finance industry and general purpose Internet security. However, the dominant development model in our industry thus far (capital-strapped startups leveraging public ledger technology for permissioned ledger applications) is insufficient for the task. This approach comes with several drawbacks. For one, the technical considerations for creating and operating a permissioned ledger network are largely antithetical to the needs of public networks. While the industry can expect continued cross-pollination between enterprise and cryptocurrency applications, it belies the genuine engineering work that needs to be done when we rely too heavily on software artifacts from cryptocurrencies. Some parts of the blockchain ecosystem have been tackling the problem of blockchain infrastructure head on, and have made considerable investment in providing solutions to the technical challenges. Given the scope of the engineering investment involved, it isn’t surprising that most of these efforts are proprietary codebases that become part of the value proposition of the startup to their customers. (As an early mover in the permissioned ledger space, Skuchain began by customizing bitcoin’s Go implementation for proofs of concept). But to capture the value of a blockchain, customers fundamentally need the ability […]
