Blockchain: What are the main challenges and opportunities for businesses? | The digital voice | Open Mic

Elliot Hill, Communications Director, VeraViews.

When the going gets tough, the tough starts. It was Billy Ocean who first sang it. But at least in the tech industry, it’s the blockchain industry that’s really lived it.

There really are few other industries like this one. With fortunes tied to the crypto markets – and most often to Bitcoin directly – blockchain technology seems to be permanently at the mercy of market sentiment. But scratch the surface and you might find that it’s not as gruesome as it appears on the charts.

In what looks set to be one of the toughest market periods for crypto to date, this is a perfect time to reflect on the challenges, but also the opportunities, of building a product or working with an advertising solution or platform in the blockchain industry. . Ready for lesson number one? Assess your market.

Fit product-market

Nothing encourages innovation like adversity. And in blockchain, it is under market conditions like these that projects with real utility and longevity begin to shine through.

Like the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, blockchain has had more than its fair share of self-reported “world changers.” Brands that claim to do everything from revolutionizing finance to transforming data storage, or even bringing about the fourth industrial revolution, are many. But they won’t always be.

The last crypto bear market of 2018 mercilessly separated the chaff from the wheat. This year’s cycle is proving no different, with projects with loosely defined use cases finding themselves adrift now that retail investors are exiting the markets.

The advantage of a niche product-market fit is that boom-bust cycles become irrelevant when technology truly fills a market need. And in 2022, no industry is as needy, technologically speaking, as advertising, which is now growing at an unprecedented rate and crying out for a transparent solution to track and pay for advertising campaigns.

Don’t rely on third parties – build your own tools

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. This ancient saying could have been created exclusively for the blockchain space. All too often, teams building solutions in the decentralized ecosystem come to rely entirely on a single third-party platform or technology component – ​​meaning their fate is completely out of their hands.

A recent and devastating example is in the Terra (LUNA) ecosystem, which made mainstream headlines recently when its ‘stablecoin’ cryptocurrency, pegged to the USD, lost its value against the dollar – sending the rest of the network tumbling along with it. This led to a halt in the blockchain and then quickly caused several decentralized applications running on top of it to temporarily halt operations altogether.

Blockchain-savvy customers are well aware of this risk. In fact, having some degree of downtime or disaster is often par for the course. But if you’re building out an enterprise solution for a traditional brand, how do you explain to them that the system you’re building on just broke and you don’t have a contingency plan?

The simple answer is: you don’t. Successful long-lived projects ensure that they are never in that position. But this does not mean that you cannot stand on the shoulders of giants if you are considering building out a blockchain solution.

Our technology, for example, is developed on top of Ethereum, through what is known as a ‘sidechain’ of the underlying blockchain ledger, called VeraChain. While Ethereum is one of the most robust networks in the world, our back-end infrastructure can be quickly adapted to a new blockchain, and our Proof of View module will continue to seamlessly run all existing campaigns with VeraChain. If you plan to launch or leverage a blockchain-based solution, make sure you have a backup plan in place.

Why is this important in advertising?

It’s easy to wax lyrical about blockchain, but what does this mean for the advertising and creative industries – and more importantly, why should you care?

The advertising industry has a problem with transparency and accountability, which has led to critical problems with cash flow and investments. Advertisers don’t trust ad-tech companies to operate ethically, and similarly, publishers struggle with cash flow due to the sheer number of third parties with which they need to reconcile campaign numbers. On the other hand, open ledger technology makes auditing easy, and its immutable nature means that once transactions are accounted for, there is no adjustment.

The advertising market itself is now based on statistical inference, and innovations have historically involved making the data easier to understand. It is only in recent years that people have started to realize that their core data may not be valid. By providing transparency, you solve this problem and open up the potential for hundreds of millions in additional revenue because the industry has a multi-billion dollar fraud problem.

Finally, teams that can navigate the murky waters of blockchain markets and continue to deliver a solution with true product-market fit are likely to be nimble, flexible and innovative – and being an early adopter of this technology can set you apart from the competition.

Prospects for the future

It sounds like a self-evident truth, that a project needs utility and real customers to thrive. But despite this, the simple concept has been pushed to its limits in the blockchain industry.

When I first entered the blockchain space, many experts derided blockchain as a solution in search of a problem. Fast forward a few years, and blockchain solutions have a problem of their own – staying on track in a market defined by volatility.

For Verasity and other B2B-focused projects, there is a clear strategy. Focus on your end users, deliver value and build tools that are consistently better and more transparent than their centralized counterparts.

It is this approach that will drive real utility blockchain projects forward, benefit the communities they have fought hard to build, and most importantly, bring value to the brands that adopt their technology.