Blockchain is finally becoming the next-gen database of choice
Kadena Founder & CEO Will Martino explains to VentureBeat how blockchain solves problems traditional databases can’t handle.
Read the full story by our Founder and CEO on VentureBeat.
Kadena Founder and CEO Will Martino shared his thoughts about blockchain as the evolution of transactional databases with VentureBeat, pointing out where blockchain is poised to make the biggest technological impact in modern businesses.
Top Highlights
On the benefits of blockchain:
“Benefits like disaster recovery, security, availability, and automation are all baked into blockchain. The serverless architecture of public blockchains makes them powerful proofs of how blockchain can deliver on enterprise-grade reliability for business databases. The costs are also not much higher: Blockchain’s ability to instantly replicate may even allow you to safely get away with the same (or even less) redundancy compared to a traditional database. Perhaps the biggest advantage? Smart contracts will regulate changes, so a new hire can’t throw a wrench into everything — the blockchain will protect you from changes that could compromise data or stability.”
On what blockchain is good for, and what it’s not good for:
“To be clear, blockchain isn’t perfectly suited to solve certain data problems, the same way that email isn’t suited for instant messaging. Big data analytics is crazy expensive to replicate, and unless you are directly monetizing the data (like selling ads), it is not worth the cost to shoehorn blockchain into an analytical workload. Blockchains are best for core business transactional data, like your account balance. They are absolutely mission-critical when it comes to account data and ownership records, the loss of which would be an existential threat to a company. A company like Walmart can probably survive the loss of all website traffic data, but it would be very much at risk if it lost its inventory ledger.”
On smart contracts as next-generation APIs:
"Blockchain tech is the evolution of the database. Smart contracts enforce business rules, while databases are backed up and verified continuously. All of the infrastructure and computational needs are calculated before deployment, and embedded rules ensure compliance from day one onward.
In fact, it looks a lot like the next generation of what APIs look like. **You’re encapsulating processes, tying them together with requests for data, and expecting results. **Right now, the business logic is processed on central servers of some kind. What’s innovative with blockchain is that you can take that logic, wrapped as a smart contract, and run it on your own. It still adheres to the rules set by the people who created it, and it must interact as expected.”
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