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According to Nikki Baird, a contributor on Forbes, three big blockchain challenges will impact retail. Baird states that retailers don’t care so much about the technological details behind how blockchain works. They just miss three key features in blockchain technology today:

High performance

Ease of use

Privacy

These are three of the key features that the Dragonchain blockchain platform delivers not only to retail, but to everyone using it, by design. Flexibility for developers and Interchain technology are two more examples that distinguishes Dragonchain’s blockchain solutions from other blockchains. Read some of the concerns Baird mentions together with Dragonchain CEO Joe Roets, and how Dragonchain already solved most of the existing challenges in blockchain.

High performance

Baird states that high performance basically comes down to scalability. Visa can handle 65,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin (4,7 transactions per second) and Ethereum (15 transactions per second) handle a lot less transactions per second currently. For use cases mentioned, such as advertising and IoT in supply chain, both Bitcoin and Ethereum are not scalable enough.

Google, on average, handles 40,000 search queries per second. In advertising, they have to make sub-nanosecond decisions into deciding what advertisements to load when you view a web page. This process can sometimes involve dozens of parties, all operating in miniscule fractions of a second.

Nikki Baird: ‘’For now, for blockchain to truly achieve retail adoption, blockchain performance and scalability as it stands today is not enough’’.

Joe Roets: While I would agree that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not at all close to what is needed, solutions do exist to meet this need. As an example, Dragonchain based its entire architecture on a philosophy geared to making blockchain technology usable in real business applications. A huge part of that is of course scalability. If a system cannot handle business at scale, it cannot be considered. We approach scalability from a few angles. Operationally, we use a hybrid blockchain architecture to isolate a business’ important processes from the worldwide consensus process. Instead, a business’ node provides near real time performance, tunable to massive systems if needed, yet leverages 5 levels of consensus on Dragonchain’s network, progressing to further and further decentralization, ultimately posting an aggregated hash in multiple public networks (currently BTC, ETH, ETC, and NEO).

We also think that this is a development and engineering issue. That is, all other platforms require specialized skill sets that traditional developers do not typically have; this affects time to market, which results in fewer successful blockchain projects. Since our business nodes are private, they allow more flexibility to the developer. They allow businesses to use their current developers with longtime experience with their data, systems, and customers. This is a massive advantage for businesses.

Privacy

As stated correctly by Baird, Bitcoin is not so anonymous as many may think. Some companies like Microsoft try to tackle privacy concerns with overly complicated and off-chain settlements, using a protocol on top of Ethereum, under the name ‘Coco’. Furthermore utilizing edge hardware and environments like Intel’s “trusted execution environment,’’ Ethereum can be used with more privacy.

However, for retailers, they also face issues with personally identifiable information and the General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, Europe’s regulations around consumer privacy.

Nikki Baird: ‘’Blockchain has the potential to make all of that much easier, if we can evolve to a place where consumers can use blockchain to store their personal information, and decide and control which companies have access to which pieces of information’’. Baird wonders who should provide this service?

Joe Roets: This should be a service that allows consumers to control access to their own information. Some term this “Self Sovereign Identity.” Without going into academic detail, we believe that this will benefit both the consumer and the organization. That is, the consumer will benefit from the fact that so many organizations won’t be holding all of their personal and financial information. At the same time, the organization will benefit from a lowered risk (in both financial and brand) of holding such sensitive information. At its core, it’s the segregation of data that will avoid the issue of information honeypots attracting attackers. It’s more organic as well, as people have a personal incentive to protect their own information. We believe that flexibility is extremely important in this area, and believe that the “factors” of identity need to be able to be captured at any degree of granularity. That is, something as specific as “eye color,” something as broad as “citizenship,” or something as abstract as “over_21” should be capturable as identity factors. These factors can then be grouped in any combination to provide a custom level of measurable identity for interactions between parties. The beauty of this is that a business that needs to know something of your identity to do business with you has the ability to allow you to choose which factors of identity you are comfortable with to expose to that business.

Another challenge Baird mentioned is that “the data is only as protected as the password — there have been spectacular bank robberies of crypto vaults and exchanges, and there have also been stories of consumers (and worse — crypto company executives) who lost the password to their crypto wallet and flat-out could not get back in.”

Joe Roets: Our angle on credentials is that they should be public key based, and should be recoverable by an average and non-technical person (the Grandma test). We do this by placing the identity itself on chain, with factors separated, and allowing rolling or recovery operations with organic, people based verification.

Ease of use

When it comes to ease of use, there is still a long way to go in crypto and in blockchain. Baird explains how she didn’t buy a Bitcoin in 2009 simply because the process to obtain one was too difficult. Since that time, ease of use has come a long way.

How can Dragonchain bring blockchain to consumers without making it readily apparent that they are based on blockchain?

Nikki Baird: ‘’For blockchain to make a difference in retail, it has to be much more about the experience than the technology’’.

Joe Roets: This is massively important to adoption of blockchain technology everywhere. I see it as a parallel to what we saw with adoption of many technologies in their early days (e.g. radio, television, Internet). Early adopters tend to need to know more, have more frustrating interfaces, and deal with a higher overall cost in using technology. Over time, better interfaces are found and tested, and costs are lowered with increasing adoption. We have a few examples of making blockchain usable to ordinary people, in ways that don’t expose or highlight the fact that the application is built atop a blockchain. The Dragonchain Academy is a great example of making a product that has no outward and direct appearance to the user that the entire system is built as a native blockchain application. We’re working on several other applications with partners that focus on the real business value and not directly on blockchain itself.

Dragonchain’s Blockchain as a Service already is capable enough to enable retailers to further adopt blockchain technologies to provide unique business value.

Dragonchain CEO Joe Roets talks about the end of Early Access Program, community verification nodes, upcoming Eternal features, open sourcing of the core platform, what keeps him motivated and stupid people.

Last week Dragonchain CEO Joe Roets, and VP of Strategic Business Development, Filip Hantson, traveled from the US to The Netherlands. One of the events attended was Blockchain Expo 2019 in Amsterdam. Luckily, Joe found some time, or a lot of time, to answer all the AMA questions that were asked on Reddit, but not yet answered. If you’ve missed the livestream on Twitter, you can either watch it back or read all the questions and answers in the article.

If you prefer to watch and listen to the full live AMA, you can do so on Dragonchain’s Twitter account.

Blockchain developer focused questions are answered by Joe Roets in a new ‘Ask Me anything’! This AMA covers digital assets, containerized smart contracts, multi-cloud and on-premise solutions and the future of Dragonchain’s commercial blockchain platform.

Dragonchain recent events:

June 19th, 2019: Amsterdam Blockchain Expo.

Good conversations between Joe Roets, Filip Hantson and the blockchain community in Amsterdam! Jack Sparrow asking great questions about open sourcing.

June 20th, 2019: WTIA Cascadia Blockchain Council Panel, Seattle.

June 26th, 2019: Roby Daquilante, Software Engineer at Dragonchain, was presenting at Coding Dojo in Bellevue on “Getting started with Blockchain and Building Custom Indexing.”

June 27th, 2019: MIPIM PropTech Seattle Meet Up.

Upcoming events:

No updates.