In the first days of the internet, it would take hours to load a single webpage. Today it takes milliseconds to load multiple pages. Undoubtedly, the internet has grown exponentially in terms of infrastructure and speed. It is through these improvements that we find it useful today.
For any technology to gain acceptance in mainstream society, it must break the barrier of speed and complexity. One way to break this barrier is to introduce the technology as a service. When such solutions emerge, SMEs can adopt the technology easily and present it to the masses.
Blockchain technology is yet to reach the level of mass adoption even though there is high hope since there are solutions already in place to offer it as a service. Blockchain as a service (BaaS) solutions are the only way to open the road for SMEs to tap into the benefits of the distributed ledger technology. These solutions come with everything that is needed for businesses to get aboard without breaking their budgets.
With BaaS, businesses do not have to worry about the skills or the enormous costs incurred in building a blockchain infrastructure from scratch. This type of service allows them to receive customized infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of setting up new systems from scratch.
Without the BaaS solutions, most SMEs would never be able to hire the skills or purchase the tools required to implement a blockchain system. Additionally, the management in most of these businesses is not tech savvy meaning that they may not see the need for blockchain. Baas solutions presents a perfect picture of the benefits of blockchain without requiring much technical expertise.
Blockchain as a Service and Scalability
For the BaaS to be effective, the issue of blockchain speed and scalability must also be addressed. People may find a technology to be useful, but if it is slower and less scalable than the traditional options, they are likely to opt for the old ways.
When it comes to the blockchain technology, speed and scalability are inter-related in that by improving scalability, the speed automatically improves.
In the recent past, the issue of blockchain speed and scalability has become critical, but fortunately, BaaS solutions that can address this challenge once and for all are coming up. However, before we discuss some of these solutions, it is essential to understand what speed and scalability mean for blockchain.
What speed and scalability means
As the adoption of the blockchain technology continues to grow, the number of transactions on each of these systems keeps growing. As a result, the huge data generated by these systems continue to pile creating a bloat.
Projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have experienced explosive growth in the past but are yet to find a solution that can allow growth without bloating their networks. The Ethereum project has gone a step ahead to address this problem through a process known as sharding, but it is still work in progress. For Bitcoin, the case is the same with several projects still ongoing.
One project that had come a long way to finding a solution to the scalability issue is Ardor, a product of the blockchain platform NXT. The project is the first ever scalable Blockchain as a Service platform for businesses. Ardor seeks to decongest the blockchain network by introducing child chains. These chains are connected to the main chain thus making it possible to prune transactions without affecting the security of the main chain. This prevents the bloat that affects other blockchain projects. Unlike other BaaS, the ardor project lets users pay transaction fees in any child chain tokens, not its native token.
Bottom line
As the scalable BaaS solutions continue to evolve, the blockchain technology will keep gaining traction in business use. This is because the more advanced the technology becomes, the more efficient it will be. Just like the internet, blockchain technology has a significant role to play in small and medium business growth, and it is a matter of time before technology gets where the internet is today.