Blockchain Technologies to Watch in 2018

If 2017 was the year of the cryptocurrency craze, with speculative valuations and endless flow of crypto ponzi-schemes (a.k.a ICOs), 2018 will be the year when blockchain-based applications will takeoff. The field has attracted a whole generation of young developers and researchers, the technology has been maturing, and use cases beyond "let's kill the banks" are settling.

However, these applications will likely not relay on bitcoin-like blockchains, but some form of distributed ledger-based platforms. In this post I will survey what I consider the more promising. I have selected those that are opensource, have a strong community, have a distinctive set of features, and offer a framework for developing innovative applications beyond fintech and digital asset management (which I think Bitcoin and Ethereum cover perfectly).

1. Hyperledger is an umbrella project under the governance of Linux Foundation and backed by big names in industry such as IBM, Hitachi, Intel, among others. It includes different subprojects with the common objective of developing platforms for enterprise-grade permissioned blockchains. The most advanced project so far is Fabric, which allows the deployment of blockchain-based applications (chain code) running as Docker containers. Its modular architecture allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. Also, it includes a management plane for deploying and configuring the chaincodes. Fabric is a project enterprise developers will feel confortable working with - B9Labs has a great introductory course for developers. However, for me the most interesting project is Sawtooth. It also offers a modular architecture for distributed ledgers, but unlike Fabric, it has a more comprehensive support for defining the application's logic, including modeling the distributed state and the valid transactions. By default is uses an Intel consensus protocols called Proof of Elapsed Time which is much less resource intensive, making it a good fit for embedding in IoT devices and Fog nodes.
2. IOTA is a distributed ledger aimed for the IoT. Its main characteristic is that it doesn't relay in a blockchain for consensus. Instead, it creates a directed graph called the Tangle of transactions, on which each transaction validates two other transactions. Nodes in the tangle can validate any transaction of their choice. The Consensus emerges as more nodes validate a transaction, increasing the confidence of its validity. This process occurs in parallel and without coordination, making this system more scalable. This unusual approach to consensus-building makes many to wonder how reliable the system would be under adverse conditions, such as collusion. A recent publication addresses these doubts offering a game-theoretical proof of the properties of the system. However, as the main use case for IOTA is the exchange of data coming from IoT devices - see for example the recently announced data market-place - problems such as double expending are not really a concern and the probabilistic approach for validation makes more sense as ti matches the notion of data accuracy. Besides it obvious use case in IoT, I won't be surprised if IOTA emerges a key technology for creating oracles for other blockchains. In any case, IOTA is still in its early stages, and no large-scale production deployments exists, so I expect 2018 the year IOTA will face real-world challenges.
3. Blockstack's ambitions is to serve as the foundation of a new, decentralized Internet. It offers not only a blockchain framework, but also application services such as naming, storage, identity, and tokens. The distinctive element of Blockstack is the concept of virtualchains: application-level blockchains embedded into a system-level blockchain. This idea is really appealing, as it addresses the main issue when launching new blockchain-based applications: bootstrapping the system until it reaches a size that makes it less vulnerable to attacks. As a side-benefit, virtualchains allow applications to migrate from one blockachain to another, preventing blockchain lock-in. Actually, the Blockstack project itself migrated from its own blockchain to to Bitcoin's blockchain in 2015. This is also important because the well-known scalability issues around Bitcoin's blockchain make desirable to have a way to move to alternative blockchains better suited for Internet-scale services. Blockstack is a mature project, with a large development community. Interestingly, there's a found for growing the application ecosystem via bounties.

Consider this an initial list which I expect to complete in the months to come. However, to the best of my knowledge, if you are interested in exploring the potential of blockchains, these are the best places to start. Happy research and please don't hesitate to contact me for comments and suggestions.