Note: Author of this article is Meng Yan, Senior Manager of IBM Greater China. He was responsible for the promotion and implementation of projects like IBM Smarter Planet, smart city, cognitive computing and other major technology in China. A year ago he began to focus on the blockchain technology and its industrial application prospects. He compared 4 schools of blockchain development: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger and BigchainDB. He proposed that 3 types of blockchain developers would be most wanted in the future.

There are three major types of blockchain-based developers that will be mostly wanted in the future.

One is those who develop blockchain-based web or mobile App. Skills required by this type of developer are no different from today’s Web and mobile developers.

The second type of developers is those who focus on smart contracts. This type of developer needs to command a smart contract language like Solidity, or Go, Java, Python and other languages. The language and algorithm level required to develop smart contracts are not so high. Multi-threading and concurrence demands are not general, which means that ordinary developers are qualified for the job. But the difficulty for a smart contract developer lies in his understanding of business flow and security. Essentially a smart contract is a commercial contract written in code, which requires a very clear and profound understanding of the business and the security. Therefore, I believe that smart contract developers will be fostered out of industrial leaders instead of professional developer because it would be much easier for them to master the Python language than programmers to understand the import and export trade rules or commercial bills.

The third type of developer is those who focus on core apps system and core platform. They must be a technical master, or in more popular terms, a back-end expert. He might need to understand languages like C + +, Java, Python, Go, JavaScript. A basic qualification includes theoretical and field experience in cryptography, distributed systems, network programming, system architecture and deployment. This type of developer is clearly going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of upcoming wave of blockchain technology.

I would like to talk about cryptography a bit more as it is the vulnerability of most developers. However if you want to outpace your competitors in the game, cryptography is where breakthrough mostly likely to happen. Even by implementing existing results of cryptography into blockchain, you are likely to come up with some unbelievable innovation. Examples are integration of zero-knowledge-proof algorithm to construct a highly anonymous blockchain system, or adopting private computing outsourcing technology to allow other nodes to verify the transaction but remain unknown to the contents of the transaction. Technology that could stimulate a large number of business model innovations is still waiting to be explored and realized by cyberpunks. Therefore, I believe that the age of cryptography science is coming soon.

Block chain is a promising, highly disruptive and imaginative technology. It has the potential to bring a completely different business era, shaping a new generation of the Internet. It could also be colluded or alienated by traditional establishments. Anyhow, the blockchain opens up a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and programmers alike.

We shall wait and see.