Blockchain development – Where are we now?

I have spent a lot of time over the last 10 years investigating new technologies with a view to integrating them into our Oracle Development if any opportunities were to arise. I feel that the more tools you have at your disposal, the better job you can do on any project. You might have the tools you use daily that will get the job done, but having some extra options available certainly helps to deliver the best projects possible. You never know when a use case might pop up that would allow you to incorporate some exciting technology you have been looking at.

I have always been supported in this endeavour as long as I could provide real-world business use cases for researching new technology – a task that is almost always easy apart from one case: blockchain.

I have been interested in this space since 2011 and have always tried to find that killer business use case to allow me to play with it at work. However, beyond financial systems that didn’t fit the bill, none of the use cases ever stuck for me. I spent many hours looking into blockchain beer, blockchain bees, and various other supply chain solutions, only to conclude that they weren’t truly providing me anything that a regular Oracle database wouldn’t.

I haven’t contributed much in the way of tech blogs over the past year, and this is because I’ve been spending time figuring out what the business case is for blockchain technologies beyond super volatile currencies.

This use case is the implementation of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as a form of digital ownership (read our NFT blog to find out more). What started as a proof of concept only a couple of years ago has become a huge industry with sports teams using NFTs as event tickets, clothing manufacturers releasing digital versions of their wares and artists bridging the gap between physical and digital media. It feels like this technology is about to explode and become beneficial to everyone. With the emergence of various “metaverse” technologies also, digital ownership seems set to be a part of our everyday lives.

Where does Oracle fit?

As always, when reviewing new technology, I like to evaluate several external offerings alongside whatever Oracle has to ensure I’m using the best tool for the job. Oracle has been talking about blockchain a lot over the last five years, but I am yet to see an implementation on Oracle technology that convinced me it was needed.

It seems that Oracle has certainly come to the same conclusions as me, as they now have NFT support on their blockchain platform, though I am still trying to find out who is using this. My gut feeling right now is that for almost all NFT use cases, building your own Oracle blockchain to do it on would defeat the point. I am still looking into this technology and the use cases and would be happy to be proved wrong.

Conclusions

NFTs are not just expensive pictures of monkeys anymore; with more and more companies getting involved in this technology, we are likely to see a jump in the number of access passes, event tickets, digital item ownership systems, etc., that are built on top of blockchain technology.

The current market leader for this technology is Solidity smart contracts on Ethereum, but other chains offer similar services. Smart contracts and NFT technologies are certainly a tool I want to have available in my toolbelt over the coming years to complement the web development we do day to day.

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