Blockchain Tech Deep Dive | 6 Principles

Blockchain technology is transforming nearly every industry, whether banking,  government, fashion or logistics. The benefits of using blockchain are substantial. Businesses can lower transaction costs, free up capital, speed up processes, and enhance security and trust.

We’re mapping out the six key principles for blockchain integration success, so businesses can navigate the challenges and opportunities this disruptive technology presents while driving innovation and competition.

Blockchain – an overview

The world is becoming decentralised. 

Many platforms, technologies, and services are moving from centralised proprietary systems to decentralised, open ones.

This presents the perfect opportunity for businesses to step up and create fundamental change in how their data is managed; from where every company has its copy of a data set to a scenario in which all parties in a network have controlled access to a shared copy.

The key benefit of this is that traditional independent institutions can collaboratively work together to integrate and optimise existing processes to mutual advantage while, crucially, not compromising on the security of sensitive data.

Software engineering excellence

If you haven’t already, it’s time for your business to embrace the change, particularly in software engineering, by diving into the world of functional programming and the design patterns it spawns. Develop and refine code that accelerates the software development process, ensuring its smooth evolution and adaptation to meet critical time-to-market demands—crucial elements, especially in the realm of blockchain.

It’s also important to adopt a contemporary approach to testing, preserving a high level of quality throughout your system’s lifecycle. This can be achieved by making use of auto-generated Property-Based Tests and continuous stress tests, coupled with traditional Test-Driven Development, to ensure robustness.

Furthermore, enable your software engineers to embrace modern agile software development methodologies that support workforce scalability as needed. Incorporating agile practices such as deployment automation, type checks, intuitive naming conventions, and comprehensive documentation is paramount, particularly during handovers or when onboarding new developers.

Building resilient networks

When delving into networking for blockchain projects, it’s crucial to assemble a team well-versed in managing automated network traffic and dynamic topologies. Look for experts who bring a wealth of experience in this area and ensure they possess the monitoring capabilities needed for seamless adaptation to evolving scenarios, enabling proactive problem-solving.

Additionally, it’s essential to inquire whether their approach incorporates back-pressure control mechanisms to safeguard the system’s capacity against potential overloads, enhancing its overall robustness. These contemporary strategies apply across various network architectures, including centralised, decentralised, and distributed peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, often accompanied by specialised service discovery mechanisms.

Peer-to-Peer blockchain networks

Engaging in clear communication with your team from the outset about these considerations can significantly streamline the development process.

Collaboration

Collaborating with seasoned engineers is vital in the creation of massively scalable systems. Their expertise is unmatched in developing messaging systems or distributed databases, which instils confidence that they will make informed decisions regarding partitioning, sharding, and replica parameters.

The demand for engineering highly scalable and distributed systems has become increasingly pronounced, a challenge that the Erlang Solutions team tackle daily. We focus on constructing distributed systems capable of accommodating billions of users and transactions daily. 

Embracing language diversity

As a business leader, Choosing the right programming language for blockchain is crucial for your company. It’s like picking the perfect tool for a job—you want something that fits just right and sets you up for success in the long run, ensuring compatibility, performance and adaptability for your future.

Business leaders might find Erlang or Elixir intriguing for blockchain development, thanks to their impressive capabilities in handling concurrency, managing faults, and scaling effortlessly. These languages shine in building distributed, real-time systems, which aligns well with the demands of blockchain applications requiring high transaction throughput and unwavering reliability. 

Also, the Erlang ecosystem boasts battle-tested tools and libraries for crafting fault-tolerant distributed systems. At the same time, Elixir, with its modern syntax and developer-friendly features, adds an extra layer of appeal. Opting for Erlang or Elixir sets the stage for crafting dependable, scalable blockchain solutions, offering the stability and performance essential for critical applications without the need for a hard sell.

Our extensive expertise in language interpretation and virtual machines has emerged as indispensable know-how in crafting diverse and modern blockchain solutions.

Integration

Integrating applications on top of complex backends and providing synchronous and asynchronous interfaces among backends is a serious job.

So it’s worth checking if your team uses frontend-facing APIs such as REST and Websocket to implement responsive applications. They should comply with industry standards for compatibility and security to drive message exchanges on top of various AMQP and JMS queuing mechanisms.

Fortifying security & resilience: Building a robust shield

Ensuring the safety and resilience of your system involves assembling the right team equipped to monitor and mend mechanisms swiftly. Employing crucial resilience components and strategies is key. From dedicated secure p2p protocols to static analysis and property-based testing, adopting these techniques bolsters the security of your system. Information validation plays a pivotal role in thwarting man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, while back pressure mechanisms act as a shield against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Employing both symmetrical and asymmetrical encryptions is essential for achieving the highest level of security possible. Additionally, paying attention to hardware security ensures that sensitive private keys remain accessible only via hardware security modules (HSM).

Conclusion

Blockchain technology offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation and collaboration across industries. By adhering to these guiding principles and leveraging the expertise of seasoned professionals, you can unlock the full potential of blockchain and stay ahead in today’s ever- evolving landscape.