Blockchain is becoming the attention of many organizations, and most businesses and companies are switching to blockchain technology to make their operations more secure and efficient. It gives you the complete freedom to perform the financial operation without sticking to the centralized authority.
What is Blockchain
In simple words, it provides you a decentralized mechanism by ensuring efficiency, transparency, immutability, and security.
If you are thinking about creating a blockchain, then you must know which type of blockchain you want to design for your entire structure.
Types of Blockchains
There are various types of blockchains: public blockchain, private blockchain, consortium blockchain, and hybrid blockchain.
Let’s discuss all these types one by one:
Public Blockchain
It is a non-restrictive, decentralized, permissionless blockchain. Similarly, it is more secure, transparent, and trustworthy than private blockchain. Anyone can be a part of this type of blockchain and its common use is mining and exchanging. It is very slow, has high power consumption, and has scalability issues.
Focusing Area: If you are looking for a centralized system then public blockchain is not your cup of tea, similarly it is not good in speed and is very expensive.
Private Blockchain
Only authorized and very specific persons can join this, authorized by a central authority, restrictive and permissioned, high in speed as well as scalability is possible due to limited nodes. Centralized authority needs trust building and it provides less security.
Focusing Area: It can be implemented for organizations and enterprise networks where limited resources would be shared with the users, and it is completely controlled by a centralized authority. It is suitable for Voting and digital identity and asset ownership.
Hybrid Blockchain
It is a hybrid-mode blockchain that behaves like both public and private blockchains. It acts like a public blockchain for the upper bodies or high-level authority like owners similarly it would act like a private one for the lower bodies like employees.
Focusing Area: If you are looking for segregated approaches then the hybrid model could be the best choice for you.
Consortium Blockchain
Semi-decentralized and managed by different organizations with the same specifications, different universities can build their semi-decentralized system using this type of blockchain.
Here are different types of blockchains listed down one by one with their pros and cons, after reading this you would be able to decide which one is meeting your requirement area. Now let’s have a broader view of creating a blockchain.
How to Create a Blockchain
To run the blockchain you need to build a high-performance infrastructure, and to create a blockchain we just don't need software, we also need hardware. Blockchain infrastructure requirements are given below:
Architecture: Decentralized, Distributed-ledger
Software: Solidity, Geth, Remix, Mist, Testnet
Hardware: High Core CPUs and GPUs, Nodes/validators/clients
Use Case: Consensus, Interface, APIs, and Platform
Blockchain is open-source and easy to create but before creating one, you need to be sure about the following things:
1: Defining Use Case
Generally, the use-case always represents how the work would be done, and how the project will perform all the desired tasks in the specific workspace. In simple words, defining a blockchain use case means how the blockchain would perform in your organization and whether it is adding some value to your business or not.
It is used in the following sectors like healthcare, supply chain, finance, real estate, cyber security, and banking.
2: Research on Similar Blockchain
Before designing you need vast research on similar projects, firstly you have to understand how they are performing and what challenges they are facing in their blockchain. So in that way you can eliminate those problems in your project and have less chance of repeating the same mistake again, which is done by the previous blockchain.
3: Choose the Suitable Consensus Mechanism
After the use case and research, it’s time to select the compatible consensus algorithm. There are so many types of consensus algorithms like proof of work (PoW), proof of stake (POS), proof of authority (POA), and many others. It is a mandatory part to select the best one that suited your business.
4: Pick the Suitable Approach
Blockchain is an open-source community, you can develop your blockchain by forking the existing blockchain like Ethereum, hyper ledger, Ripple, Tangle, Bitcoin, and many others. Or you can build it from scratch which is a very difficult approach and time-consuming.
5: Node Designing
Once you are done with a use case, research, and suitable approach it's time to design the node, which means you have to select the blockchain type whether it should be public or private. It is totally up to your business requirement, and according to that, you will configure each node. Each node has enough memory to accomplish the tasks like consensus algorithm implementation to check the validation and many other tasks done by the node.
6: Blockchain Instance Designing
The Blockchain platform you select will serve as the foundation for creating the Blockchain instance. You must consider several Blockchain instance-related factors before beginning to create the instance. Like Multi-Signature, Key Management, Parameters, Native Asset, Address Format, Key Format, and Block Signature.
7: Integrating API
Most of the blockchain comes with pre-defined APIs and some don’t support pre-defined APIs. You can integrate various suitable APIs with the blockchain to accomplish various tasks. Various types of APIs include smart contracts, smart assets issuance, payment, exchange, retirement, and authentication of data through hashes and digital signatures.
8: User Interface Designing
For the user interaction with the backend setup, you will have to design an attractive user-friendly interface using HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, and ReactJS.
Conclusion
To create a blockchain you need to build a high-performance infrastructure, and to create a blockchain we just don't need software, we also need hardware. The 7 steps to create a blockchain: define the use case, research similar blockchains, choosing the suitable consensus, picking the suitable approach, node designing, blockchain instance designing, API integration, and user interface designing.
