Companies everywhere are already scrambling to understand how integrating blockchain technology into their current business practices will benefit them. The main problem facing businesses is a lack of information on how to do this.

Many people are concerned that if they do choose to integrate blockchain solutions into their existing infrastructure, the cost of blockchain implementation will be too high and will cause too many troublesome problems. While these concerns are indeed understandable, blockchain implementations for businesses of all sizes don’t have to be expensive or painful.

Blockchain technology promises to revolutionise many of the transaction-based processes that underpin the global economy. According to an article published in Bitcoin Journal, IDC estimates that global spending on blockchain solutions will reach $9.2 billion by 2021. If this is true, their report emphasizes, this equates to a staggering 81.2 percent compound annual growth rate.

With growth estimates such as these widely predicted, there is no doubt why there is such an amazing buzz around blockchain solutions today. In this article, I aim to examine in more detail how to integrate blockchain technology into your project and the benefits of doing so.

I will also give examples of current blockchain platforms and businesses that are already being implemented to better realize the potential of this new technology.

How to implement blockchain technology

The best known use of blockchain technology is cryptocurrencies. Indeed, blockchain was actually invented by today’s legendary Satoshi Nakamoto, which allowed the creation of the world’s first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the principle of blockchain to solve the problem that all digital currencies face, namely the “double expenditure” problem. Until then, digital currency could be copied on all systems and, in theory, the same coin could be used multiple times.

By decentralizing the network and allowing it to be controlled and maintained by multiple nodes not even in the same geographic area, blockchains eventually create a viable solution to this problem.

Build the right development team

The key to successfully implementing blockchain technology in a project is having the right team. Too many managers make the mistake of simply offloading projects to their existing development teams without proper consideration of the consequences.

As I’ve already said, blockchain is a relatively new technology that requires unique skills in other types of software development. Any developer working on blockchain needs to be familiar with cryptography, how decentralized peer-to-peer networks work, organizations like Ethereum, and how to host smart contracts.

For this reason, any team should hire at least one experienced blockchain developer as well as someone with the skills and passion to do blockchain development. Any team using smart contracts should be able to code in Solidity, be familiar with blockchain apis, current platforms provided by blockchain companies to aid development, etc.

Good blockchain developers are aware of platforms designed to address blockchain scalability issues, such as BigchainDB and Hyperledger, which make it easy to create blockchains with only private permissions, and so on.

Another interesting area is cloud-based blockchain development. Companies such as IBM, Amazon and Microsoft now offer development space on their cloud platforms. Called Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), this service brings companies and developers together to create viable blockchain solutions for their specific business needs.

The use of platforms such as these can help companies save money and help them get their blockchain projects up and running in much less time.

Now, projects such as Unibright promise companies that they will bypass developers entirely because they don’t need any coding, although the promise of such a framework still doesn’t provide an effective solution for more complex projects.

For this reason, I strongly recommend hiring a development team that is skilled in blockchain deployment. Despite some upfront costs, in fact, a good development team usually saves time and money because the risk of problems is greatly reduced.

My final thought

Although I can only briefly cover this interesting topic in this very short article, I hope it gives you a sense of how to integrate blockchain technology into your project. The simple fact is that most corporate processes can benefit from the additional security and automation provided by blockchain solutions.

It may take some time for off-peg blockchain solutions to become commercially available, so companies that want to succeed now need to undertake the development and implementation process themselves.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, companies can simplify the whole process of implementing blockchain solutions by ensuring they have the best development teams working for them. After all, developers are still the key to a project’s success.