What Businesses Need To Know About Blockchain-as-a-Service

Blockchain has come a long way since it was first introduced with the minting of Bitcoin back in 2009. Although it was originally designed by Satoshi Nakamoto to power the world’s first decentralized, peer-to-peer digital money, innovators have come to realize that the technology can be transformative in numerous industries. 

The value of blockchain comes from its ability to immutably store and share data which can be accessed by multiple parties in a fast and secure way, without any single entity being responsible for safeguarding that information or facilitating updates. This has big implications in many sectors. For financial institutions, blockchain can power faster and less costly transactions, while in healthcare it can be used to secure patient records and maintain privacy while allowing medical professionals to share data. 

For all its potential though, adoption of blockchain has been slow in many industries. The complexity and costs associated with building, operating and maintaining blockchain infrastructure are significant barriers to adoption, as many companies lack the expertise and skilled professionals are few and far between. Looking to fix this is an emerging band of so-called Blockchain-as-a-Service providers that promise a quick and easy way for organizations to develop on-chain applications without any blockchain expertise. 

What is Blockchain-as-a-Service? 

Known as BaaS, it’s a kind of service that allows companies to use simple tools to develop, host and operate their very own blockchain infrastructure, complete with decentralized applications, smart contracts, digital tokens and other capabilities that are unique to the world of blockchain. 

The BaaS provider sets everything up and then manages all of the required activities and tasks necessary to keep that blockchain infrastructure up and running. It’s similar in some ways to the idea of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, where cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services lease servers, storage, artificial intelligence and other services to businesses. 

BaaS gives companies a much faster, less complex and cheaper path to blockchain adoption and an easy way to build dApps that run atop of the distributed architecture. By providing companies with the ability to work with blockchain without making massive, upfront investments, it’s believed the BaaS market could potentially accelerate blockchain adoption similar to how the Software-as-a-Service market helped to boost cloud adoption over the previous decade. 

How Does BaaS Work? 

The great thing about BaaS is that companies don’t really need to know much beyond what they’re hoping to use the blockchain for. The BaaS provider will take care of all the underlying concerns, setting up the blockchain infrastructure and managing it on an ongoing basis. All the customer has to do is pay a regular fee to the BaaS provider to keep the infrastructure up and running. 

The BaaS operator will take care of essential aspects such as ensuring the proper allocation of resources, hosting requirements, bandwidth management and so on. This enables clients to narrow their focus to whatever it is they’re trying to achieve with blockchain – i.e. building applications and creating projects that use those apps – rather than worrying about the blockchain’s performance. 

Choosing a Blockchain-as-a-Service Provider

The vast majority of organizations will be running analytics applications atop of the blockchain, and so they will need to look for a set of core features necessary to do this. 

These include platform architecture management services, modular, preconfigured networks and infrastructure, resource allocation, bandwidth management, data security, support for smart contracts and tools for building and monitoring applications. Other services that may be useful include dashboards for easily viewing and analyzing code, built-in connections to third-party services and auditable transaction records. 

Some of the best known BaaS providers are the legacy cloud computing giants. One of the earliest offerings on the market was the IBM Blockchain Platform, which is built atop of the open-source Hyperledger Fabric project. IBM has since evolved its offering with specialist blockchain templates for a range of industries. For instance its Food Trust blockchain service is designed for tracking food shipments and brings more transparency to supply chains. IBM has also worked with dozens of European banks on the we.trade blockchain network to facilitate trade finance. 

Amazon Web Services has its own comprehensive BaaS known as the Amazon Managed Blockchain service, which is a fully-managed offering that enables companies to create and manage their own scalable and distributed blockchain network. Its key building blocks include the Quantum Ledger Database, which serves as a centralized, verifiable transaction log. It also hosts a marketplace with tools and offerings from more than 70 validated partners. Unlike many of its competitors, Amazon Managed Blockchain service provides options for running either Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain frameworks. 

Companies that want a more focused offering meanwhile might consider the likes of Ferrum Network. Ferrum has built a fast, interoperable BaaS that goes much further than providing infrastructure, also offering a number of services that aim to solve the problems faced by new blockchain projects. 

For instance Ferrum’s Staking-as–a-Service solution is designed to help fix the unstable token prices that affect many new projects. If a company can ensure much of the tokens in the circulating supply are staked, this will remove liquidity for the market and stabilize the token price. With Ferrum’s service, users are offered rewards in the form of other tokens and assets, in return for staking their tokens, providing an incentive to do so. 

Ferrum also helps token stability with its Anti-Bot Technology that monitors token sales in order to prevent bots buying and selling many thousands of tokens. Ferrum scans the blockchain for bot activity and blacklists those wallet addresses it detects, preventing them from getting their hands on tokens meant for legitimate investors. 

One final advantage of Ferrum’s BaaS is its white label token bridge. With this, clients can bridge their project’s tokens across to various popular blockchain infrastructures, such as Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Chain. 

Final Word

With the rise of BaaS providers, more companies will be able to embrace the benefits of blockchain to seize a competitive advantage and future-proof their business. The key advantage of BaaS is it enables companies to adopt blockchain now, without making a substantial investment in research, planning, infrastructure and expertise. In return for a regular monthly or annual fee, the blockchain infrastructure companies need is good to go, and more than that, they’ll have expert assistance on hand should the need arise. 

With a proactive and trusted BaaS provider taking care of the management and the risks, companies of any size can finally take the leap. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice