Identifying the Right Blockchain for Business Marketing Solution

This is article #5 of “180 Days to Startup” series documenting my entrepreneur journey. In case you want to start from the beginning, please click HERE to the first article.

Most of the highly valued blockchains were created for specific needs. There is not one blockchain that can meet all requirements. Just like automotives, sedan and pickup trucks were designed for different purposes. More specifically, you wouldn’t drive F-150 for the sake of saving gas nor would you drive a Corolla to show off (of course, unless it’s AE86). Knowing the customer needs and product requirements are critical to choosing a suitable platform.

As mentioned in my previous article, we needed a blockchain that can accommodate our high-frequency transaction needs due to the social media interactions. We also need the platform to be fast, cost effective, scalable, stable, economically-focused, and ease of development. Essentially, we need something that has high practicality score.

Chinese CCID Ranking of Blockchain – middle 3 columns are the measuring criteria: Technology, Application, and Innovation (left to right)

According to the ranking of blockchain score by the Chinese IT Ministry, both NEO and Ethereum scored extremely high in application capability. This ranking along with our research showed that these 2 are easily our finalists. While some many may argue that Ethereum is the better choice due to its wide North American adoption, we eventually went with NEO for a few reasons. One of them is due to operational cost.

The cost to calculate and store data on Ethereum blockchain can become very expensive. With the amount of transactions that nodis.io can potentially reach, it will become problematic. In contrary, NEO has a 1 time Smart Contract call charge of 0.0001 GAS (NEO blockchain’s version of gas to operation the platform) and no fee for data storage. Even if we get to a point of 1 million transactions, it’ll just be a manageable 100 GAS (or $629 USD in today’s price).

Below are some of the other advantages of NEO that we believe will be beneficial for nodis.io:

1. Smart Economy — NEO specifically developed the blockchain with trades and economy in mind. Its goal is to digitize any physical assets. All users have a digital identity so that the owners are clearly identified. This is extremely important for legal compliance and legitimacy of ownership.
2. High Transaction per Second (TPS) — NODIS.io has the potential to generate significant amounts of transactions due to the community validation feature. We need a blockchain that has high TPS. Bitcoin can do 3–4 transaction per second, Ethereum does around 15, and NEO is currently at 1,000 with the potential to get up to 10,000. We are aware of the Ethereum Sharding project, but it may not actually happen until 2020.
3. Free Cost of Storage (as of now) — As mentioned above, while there is a cost of 0.0001 GAS for each transaction, there is no cost for storage.
4. Efficient Consensus Mechanism — NEO uses the Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism. It allows for the community to decide who will be the consensus node (bookkeeper). A consensus is achieved when two-thirds of the voting participants agree with the consensus node’s version of the blockchain. This mechanism allows for quicker validations with less resource consumption for higher scalability.
5. Finality — Due to NEO’s dBFT consensus system, it is almost impossible to fork. As long as the consensus node has 66% of the vote, the decision will be enforced. In the case that the community does not agree with the consensus node, a replacement bookkeeper will take the spot to propose an agreeable version.
6. NeoContract (Smart Contract 2.0) — NEO uses a lightweight virtual machine called NeoVM. It allows for faster start up while taking less resources. It is highly scalable, reliable, and possesses high certainty through a combination of high concurrency, dynamic partitioning and low-coupling design. It also optimizes and reorganizes Smart Contract codes before executing for efficiency. Lastly, it can be used with familiar IDEs such as Visual Studio and Eclipse.
7. Coding Language Flexibility — NEO allows for C#, Java, Python, and Go programming languages.

For more technical information on the NEO blockchain, you can visit their documentation page.

Now that we have decided NEO to be our blockchain platform, the next big question is: how are we going to position the solution so that it is NOT based on the value of cryptocurrency? Again, our project, nodis.io, isn’t looking to create another digital currency for people to replace fiat currency. There are way too many of them out there. I believe what the market really need now is a solution to a problem that can truly benefit the users. Just like any company, if the service is valuable, the company will be valuable, and the crypto that benefits the users will be valuable as well. This is how we can repay the trust of our investors. I will be writing about this topic about 2 weeks from now.

If you find what I wrote even just a tiny bit interesting, please follow me on Medium and give me some claps. You can also follow us on Telegram and Instagram to get the latest content and project updates. Thanks for reading!