...by Daniel Szego
quote
"On a long enough timeline we will all become Satoshi Nakamoto.."
Daniel Szego

Monday, August 27, 2018

Blockchain strategy and bootstrapping the ecosystem for developers


With the appearance of the newer and newer blockchain platforms, every company tries to position  and bootstrap the platform differently regarding the developer community and attract more and more developers the work with the platform. Strategies might vary as:

- creating a brand new platform with a brand new language: the best example for that is solidity, as it was one of the first language for blockchain development it made sense to invent a brand new language. Similar attempts were initiated by Vyper or by the modelling language of Hyperledger Fabric Composer. 

- supporting a well-known language: many platforms tries to use a well-known language which was previously widely used by programmers, like Java or Javascript, and attract as much developers from the given language as possible. Similar strategy is the choice of Java for Hashgraph, or the Java and Javascript for Hyperledger Fabric.

- last but not least, there are platforms that support multiply programming languages like Tendermint or Babel, trying indirectly attract everybody who is a developer throughout the world.   

The strategy can be however extended. As the aim should not be be of any such a platform to attract as much developer as possible, but as much application builders or applications as possible. In this sense strategical direction can be to attract business users instead of developers and provide no-cost or low-cost application development environments. Another idea might be to provide an interface or possibility to integrate different exiting business applications, or use directly a domain specific languages for modelling businesses integrated with the blockchain platform, like different BPMN notations.