It is a common misconception that every standard software architect can become a blockchain architect with the help of a couple of weeks intensive education. This is actually far from the reality. Although designing a decentralized system on the blockchain requires some components and ideas from the world of the classical software architectures, blockchain system engineering requires more strongly the skills to design and implement complex cryptoeconmical systems. Among the others, the following fields must be covered:
- Designing for trust model
- Scaling the architecture based on fine-tuning the consensus or implementing off-chain scaling to the required trust model.
- Economically designing a one or more token architecture, like for stable usage tokens.
- Designing crypto and privacy models, like with increased privacy as zero knowledge proofs or secure multiparty protocols.
As a sum up, a blockchain architect should have its competence only around one third from a software architect. The rest should be cryptography, pure economics, and of course a lot of blockchain specific knowledge.
