Decentralized Application Developers Must Prepare For Vertical Blockchains And Interoperability

Crowd Machine, the distributed computer for building decentralised apps, is raising awareness with developers that their focus must shift towards interoperability as blockchains become more specialized into vertical segments.

The company

is highlighting this trend as it believes app developers and crypto-companies that are becoming too wedded to a single blockchain are potentially putting themselves at risk by ignoring a key emerging trend in the industry. Crowd Machine’s CEO and Founder, Craig Sproule said:

“While the explosion of ICOs in 2017 has brought a range of new projects to the market, everyone wants to know which will be the eventual winner. As a platform for building decentralised apps across different blockchains, we’re seeing the emerging trend toward verticalized blockchains accelerating. As an industry, we need to address blockchain interoperability as an inherent blockchain capability before we see major integrations challenges emerge.”

One of the initiatives that Sproule has highlighted as making progress in this area is the Blockchain Interoperability Alliance, which was announced in November 2017. This new group, which involves Aion, ICON and Wanchain, aims to advance standards that would promote a greater degree of connectivity between different blockchains. Sproule believes that standardization could be an important route, as we see more blockchains start to specialise in areas such as title transfers, medical records, authentication, event registrations and energy trades.

“At the moment, interoperability is managed at the app level, but that requires developers to be proficient in different smart contract languages, APIs or third party tools. If the interoperability requirement is to continue to be resolved within the app, then an approach would be to standardize on a common smart contract language across all blockchains. Failing that, then app development platforms can provide a level of abstraction that generates smart contracts or calls for each blockchain being utilized”,

said Sproule. Crowd Machine’s smart contract auto-generation feature, which was announced earlier this month, will help to play its part. It will make it possible to auto-generate a smart contract definition for all common blockchain networks, meaning developers can create the logic they want without worrying about the underpinning smart contract technology. This significant development also means that blockchains become subservient to the app and, through the Crowd Machine Network, makes it possible to use the blockchain that offers the best price at the time of transaction.