How to actually move forward with a blockchain pilot

It drives me up the wall when people talk and talk about doing something and never actually get up and do it. I hated it when I was a teenager in a band, and it frustrates me now when I’m trying to get a new project off the ground. In the information and computer technology industries, I think it comes down to a disconnect between the various components that traditionally make up a company.

The business side of your company thinks that a blockchain solution may be just the thing to offer customers new and innovative value propositions.

The engineering side of the company wants to gain experience in leading-edge technologies such as blockchain, but is already spread too thinly given current workloads and project demands.

The finance side is concerned how much a blockchain pilot project will cost, and the only thing that makes them consider it is a phobia of the company being labeled an “irrelevant dinosaur”.

Sometimes it seems incredible that anything new ever happens in the corporate world, with such diverse motivations, perspectives, fears, and desires.

At Chainfrog we identified this problem almost a year ago, and have been working ever since to produce software that bridges the gap between talk and action when it comes to blockchain.

If you’re thinking of deploying a blockchain solution, get your database administrators and software engineers to have a look at Chainfrog’s flagship product Blockbinder. It allows your company to spin up a blockchain proof of concept using your existing databases [1], at an affordable rate. You can be sharing data between different systems on your internal network over a blockchain within minutes, and developing blockchain use cases with a real tangible reference point in the form of a running pilot project.

Blockbinder is licensed on a monthly subscription, the basic starter package (a cloud-based blockchain node and two database client licenses) is only 4200€ per month, and can be canceled at any point. This protects you from sinking a fortune into a blockchain experiment that later proves to be misguided [2].

Your engineers can tell your business managers if their propositions make sense, and finance will be pleasantly surprised at the low cost. There you are – stuff getting done, new things to talk about, and everyone is happy.

How often does that happen?

[1] Blockbinder currently supports connecting MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases together through a Multichain blockchain.

[2] This article from Florean Krueger summarizes the issues surrounding traditional blockchain pilots very nicely: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-ideas-how-avoid-costly-blockchaindlt-experiments-florian-krueger/