There has been a great deal of hype around blockchain ever since the Bitcoin has seen a sharp, dramatic upsurge in its prices, to be specific in last 2017. As a result, businesses and end-users have started conducting the market research and assessing the strength of the competitive advantages it has at its disposal. As businesses are betting their money on this platform, the demand for full-stack decentralized blockchain app development is at its full pace. With the increasing demand, it’s utmost importance to comprehend the requisites, stacks, and tools involved in a blockchain app.
So if you are thinking about developing a cryptocurrency app, virtual wallet, or an IoT app using blockchain solutions, there are some questions you need to bring up before getting started. Questions like: What exactly do you want to build? Which blockchain platform should you use for the development? How much time and cost do you require? These are just some of the questions that are relevant to the process and believe it or not, the list is quite long. Though the blockchain technology is emerging as a leading tech breakthrough trend with ultimate potential, investing in the developing process without a clear understanding would be completely impractical and wastage of your resources.
In this guide, we will cover the technical as well as organizational aspects of the blockchain app development, so let’s get started!
1. Choose a Reliable Blockchain Solution
Before getting started with the development process, you need to figure out a robust application strategy. Define the primary objectives of your blockchain-powered app development and decide you want to develop blockchain apps either based on networks or cryptocurrency support solutions.
Based on networks, Blockchain is broadly classified as Permissionless based or Permissioned based solutions.
- Permissionless: This platform is broadly available where anyone can publically access the entire network, which includes code, transactions, public nodes, and so on.
- Permissioned: It’s a closed infrastructure where only the authorized members can participate and are eligible to handle as well as validate data transactions. For example, voting systems.
When it comes to the blockchain app development based on cryptocurrency support, you can either settle on cryptocurrency based support or non-cryptocurrency solutions.
- Cryptocurrency based Blockchain: Such apps are developed and deployed based upon the cryptocurrencies. Some of those are:
- Virtual Wallets
- Crypto Exchange
- Initial Coin offerings (ICO)
- Decentralized Apps (Dapp)
b. Non-cryptocurrency based solutions: Solutions like these are usually based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that supports the distribution of database (or a collection of data) across several different cloud computing devices and nodes.
2. Identify The Most Suitable Platform
While there are a number of Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms that allow you to develop decentralized applications without having to create multiple separate blocks from scratch. Most of these platforms are open-source and offer various capabilities and functionalities including smart-contract, decentralized application hosting, secure payment options, chain management, etc. The top six platforms are:
- Ethereum
- EOS
- Multichain
- Hyperledger
- IOTA
- Quorum
Before deciding on a particular platform, make sure that you audit your internal capabilities along with the positives and negatives of each platform. That will allow you to identify the talent pool available and make the right decision for progressing your blockchain app development further. When developing an enterprise-level app or system, you should lay extra computational efforts on the security and stability constraints of the platform.
3. Design The Architecture:
The next step is to design an architecture that meets the goals of your project and lets you integrate the new advancements into your production environment. The blockchain apps are hosted in the cloud, in-house, or in combination, also known as the hybrid model. These architectures are aimed at allowing multiple options for software as well as hardware implementation and customization of the key schedule, including operating systems, disk space, and processors. Make sure that the safety level of each node and the entire system can potentially support the fulfillment of high-level requirements of your app, thereby offering the most immaculate experience.
4. Select An Appropriate Consensus Mechanism:
Since Blockchain technology is a decentralized, distributed ledger system, it’s important that all the participants of the network reach an agreement to authenticate a transaction. Different blockchain app development platforms run upon different fault-tolerant consensus algorithms, such as Proof of Work, Paxos, Proof of Elapsed time, RAFT, etc. Using the most suitable consensus protocol allows untrusted parties to agree to a common solution and handle transactions within the chain more efficiently. Once the majority of the network members come to a consensus, they receive an identical copy of the time-stamped transactions.
5. Pick The Best Programming Language For The Project
Deciding to commence with the blockchain app development bandwagon is not the challenge. The actual challenge is – choosing the right programming language for your development project. Ultimately, you should ask yourself these following questions:
Where do I begin?
Which programming language should I choose and why?
How can I master it?
Should I begin with a traditional language or turn towards the advanced one?
These are a few basic questions that you need to know the answer to as soon as you think of building a blockchain app. While the process of deciding on the best programming language is a very subjective question, the answer simply depends on the developer’s learning curve and which language they find themselves the most comfortable with. Apart from the conventional programming languages like C++, Go, Java, and Python, there are other advanced blockchain-specific coding languages such as Solidity and Simplicity used by developers to create interesting smart things.
6. Build Authentic, Powerful APIs
Although various software development companies offer a robust set of pre-built APIs to attain various development functionalities, you’ll still have to build specific, authentic APIs for several distinct reasons, which include:
- Generating key pairs and addresses;
- Establishing communication between the server and the client;
- Performing various functions associated with auditing;
- Using digital stamps, signatures, and hashes to perform data authentication;
- Updating Workflows; and
- Storing and retrieving data from the chain.