Blockchain is one of the most promising technological innovations in recent memory and has captured the attention of innovative startups and legacy institutions alike. The list of industry-leading enterprises building on the blockchain spans tech leaders (Microsoft), financial institutions (JP Morgan, Santander), and even national governments (Singapore, Dubai, Brazil). But as with any emerging technology, there are some particular and unique quirks and obstacles that all early adopters will face along the way for which even the savviest business leaders considering blockchain solutions should be prepared.

In the coming weeks, we’ll dive deep into the key challenges that enterprises face when implementing blockchain tech. To begin, here’s a quick walkthrough of some of those problems…

Jeremy Millar discussing ConsenSys and the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance in 2017

6 Questions to Ask When Considering Blockchain Solutions for Enterprise

How do you plan blockchain projects that provide the greatest utility?

Blockchain technology is still nascent. It is more expensive and time-consuming to build a blockchain application than a traditional cloud app in many situations. Successful applications will not only create efficiencies, but also have a sufficient impact on the status quo. That is to say: You have to find the right problem before you can build the right solution. There are use cases that can create incredible value, but it’s important to make sure you’ve selected the right ones to demonstrate the real capabilities of the technology.

Before we build anything at ConsenSys, we evaluate the blockchain use case to make sure there is a return on investment. We do this by mapping the business process and use case to specific blockchain capabilities: digital signatures, distributed immutable ledgers, smart contracts, tokenization and decentralized identity. We only pursue applications where we can demonstrate how these basic blockchain building blocks provide significant benefits to an application and solve a real problem.

A key element for success is to ideate the future state. What can the business process look like as a decentralized network? Often times, these networks look radically different — and radically better — than the current business processes, with many fewer steps, intermediaries and costs, releasing capital and improving user/customer experience.

2. Which technology should you use? What are the standards?

Today, clients tell us there are predominantly two technologies emerging as ‘de facto standards’ for building enterprise blockchain applications: IBM Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. At ConsenSys, we build applications on the Ethereum blockchain; both the larger public network, and private Ethereum blockchains.

We use the Ethereum blockchain for three main reasons:

Ethereum is the only decentralised smart contract platform designed to be general-purpose and global from the offset

With Ethereum, you can deploy private chains, public chain decentralized apps (dapps), and consortium chains, both on-premise and in the cloud

Ethereum has the largest developer pool globally, which is advancing the platform rapidly, and also provides enterprises choice in terms of implementation partners

Later in this series, we’ll dive further into the differences between Fabric and Ethereum and the distinction between the public Ethereum blockchain and private implementations.