Steps to Develop a Blockchain Solution from Scratch
Building a blockchain solution is a time- and research-intensive project, and one that’s highly dependent on your distinct business. But regardless of your needs or objectives, you’ll need to follow some key steps for development.
Step 1: Identify a Problem to Solve
It’s easy to get caught up in all the benefits that a blockchain solution can offer. But remember: It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer. You should first hammer down exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. Take a look at your overall business needs and closely compare them to the high-level use cases of blockchain development that we’ve explained in detail above.
It can be helpful to clearly develop a problem statement, which should outline all of the challenges you’re looking to solve. Double-check that a blockchain solution is actually capable of solving these issues. Then, decide whether you’ll need to migrate your current solution to a blockchain application or build an application from the ground up.
Step 2: Draft Your Business Requirements
Next, you’ll need to draft your business requirements to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Consider which technologies you’ll need both on-chain and off-chain for a complete ecosystem. You can use these details to create a more tangible product roadmap, which will help keep you on track for deadlines and help you understand resource requirements.
The next step is to identify a consensus mechanism—a type of methodology used to achieve trust, security, and agreement among a decentralized computer network. There are many consensus mechanisms from which you can choose, but some of the most popular ones today include:
Proof of work
Proof of stake
Byzantine fault-tolerant
Deposit-based consensus
Proof of elapsed time
Your consensus mechanism is highly dependent on your unique business needs and objectives, so make sure you take the time to look into each and determine the best fit for you.
Step 4: Choose the Best Blockchain Platform
The choice of platform for your blockchain application will influence the skill set you’ll need from your development team, so it’s important that you get it right. The whole process takes quite a bit of research and time for proper development, so make sure you choose the platform that best aligns with your business needs.
When evaluating your options, consider the problems you’re looking to solve, consensus mechanisms, cost, developer requirements, and expected timeline.
Step 5: Design Your Blockchain Nodes
It’s crucial to determine whether you’ll need a permissioned or permissionless blockchain network, which programming languages you’ll use, and any other elements that may affect development. Do you need a private, public, or hybrid solution to meet your business needs? Will the blockchain nodes run on the cloud, on-premises, or both? Which operating system will your application run on (e.g., Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Windows, or Red Hat)? There are a lot of factors at play in this step, so make sure you research all of your options and measure them against your objectives, available resources, and budget.
Step 6: Plan Your Blockchain Configuration
For the majority of blockchain platforms, you’ll need to plan for a variety of configuration elements, including:
Permissions
Asset issuance
Asset re-issuance
Atomic exchanges
Key management
Multi-signatures
- Parameters
Native assets
Address formats
Key formats
Block signatures
Hand-shaking
Keep in mind that you can modify some of these elements at run-time. Nonetheless, it’s always best to plan ahead to ensure successful development.
Step 7: Build Your APIs
While some platforms include pre-made application programming interfaces (APIs), others do not. Depending on your needs, you may need to build APIs for:
Generation of key pairs and addresses
Performance of audit-related functions
Data authentication (through digital signatures and hashes)
Data storage and retrieval
Smart-asset lifecycle management
Smart contracts
Step 8: Design the User Interface
Once you’ve planned the entire app, you can start designing the user interface (UI) for each software component. The APIs you’ve designed will integrate with UIs on the back-end: Visual designs affect the app’s overall look, and technical designs impact the app’s architecture.
Step 9: Choose an Accelerator to Optimize Your Blockchain Application
Now that you’ve built your blockchain app, how do you know its deployment will be a success? Compute-intensive blockchain applications need a hardware accelerator to enhance performance, provide flexibility, and provide efficient use of power.
Accelerators also help optimize individual components of blockchain, such as transaction validation, governance, and data storage. They’re essential for saving both time and storage space, as they distribute transaction loads among several components to increase both transactional speed and output.
