Elections Conversation: solid case studies for enterprise adoption?

[jason.lee]

Hi all,

NEM has been positioned as a platform for enterprise use, it is featured in our website and a lot of our presentations revolves around enterprise adoption. As someone who has been promoting NEM regularly, when I meet potential enterprise companies (usually with little understanding of crypto and blockchain), I mention a few ‘classic’ use cases that NEM has been working on.

Where I get somewhat stuck is when they ask me for something more ‘in-depth’ like a case study or walk-through of an enterprise using NEM.

Can we come up with world-class reports showcasing NEM’s fundamentally superior technology? I think the team has done an excellent job developing examples on our website, building a use case map and there could be a very long post on all the ‘use cases’ we have, here are some: public sector, voting, degree verification, supply chain, intellectual property, entertainment, digital collectible assets, tagging of luxury products, IoT (Internet of Things)/IoNEM, healthcare and much more.

Of course, there are multiple more use cases that I may have missed out (please share them) but what I would like to explore is in building solid case studies on our use cases for enterprise adoption, especially those who are not bound by NDAs. Can we come up with reports like this that provide a structured approach towards understanding our platform.

Examples:

Specific industry review - Supply Chain for the Beef industry by Deloitte
Joint collaboration - Logistics by DHL in cooperation with Accenture
Publication - Blockchain case studies by Harvard Business Review
Report - Blockchain for environment report by World Ecnomic Forum

I have tried contributing through a joint-article on “Cryptocurrency and blockchain: thoughts for the future” which was published in the LexisNexis Internet Law Bulletin’s promotional piece for ILB 21.6. This is one of the largest portal for legal professionals in 175 countries. You can read the full version here. However, all these won’t work unless or until we influence the use of the NEM blockhain, especially the public chain (private chain options has been preferred with enterprise companies).

Question is:

1. Would it bring confidence and benefit to have in-depth reports which we can give to NEM leaders across the world to use?
2. Is it necessary to develop solid case studies for large corporates, enterprise, government etc.? What are other ways besides showcasing use cases?
3. Are we overcomplicating things and should we just have have a step-by-step guide for enteprise adoption for business people and a separate one for developers?

We have been working with token projects who are swapping from other blockchain protocols to NEM, 2019 could be the year where we now target enterprise projects to continue deepening relationships and truly champion NEM as an enterprise-ready solution. We need solid case studies to build a solid foundation for NEM.

[thilon]

Hi Jason,
I share my experience.First of all, we should have an in-depth understanding of an industry and its problems. Secondly,We should know how to use NEM blockchain to solve the industry’s problems, and what benefits it brings to the industry. For example, improve efficiency, save costs and so on. Finally, for a company, We should understand the problems faced by company.Then we use NEM blockchains to solve the problem.

hope to help you.

[memario]

Can we come up with world-class reports showcasing NEM’s fundamentally superior technology?

Here’s the thing Jason, it isn’t, never has been and won’t be with Catapult. NEM is not superior technology and the fact that you strugge to come-up with showcases shows that.

Don’t tell me it’s easier to use, it’s documentation isn’t up to par at all and the API isn’t exactly intuitive either(I realize certain complexity comes with the territory).
Don’t tell me off-chain smart contracts are better than on-chain because there is no such thing as off-chain smart contracts. Either you have smart contracts (which implies decentralized execution) or you don’t.
It doesn’t have superios performance, in fact it’s abysmal in that regard.
It doesn’t have a better ecosystem because there aren’t many devs working with it/on it.
It doesn’t have better or more libraries either. It has the sdk but that’s about it. How many of all those listed on the website are being maintained and actually support the majority of funcationality ? My guess is few.

The only thing that people might have a point with is hat nem has some “hard coded smart contracts” like multi-sig that are indeed more secure and easier to use than say doing multi-sig on Ethereum but that’s it and that’s not gonna be enough in any universe. Not to mention plenty of other projects have that too. This type of thing was basically the norm in 2014. Remind me, what year is it again ?
Also ETH has easily used templates for multi-sig contracts. Now you’re gonna shout “B…But those could have bugs”. Guess what…so could nem’s multi-sig. Developers are just people and that includes nem’s.

IMHO nem’s only real play is to become the cheapest and easiest to use and it has failed miserably at that (yes I’ve used it myself). The private option is probably attractive to businesses but then again, they could run any chain privately because they’re all open-source.

The fact that nem was paraded as superior just reflects the lack of technical understanding on the foundations part. Let me point out that this is not a criticism of Jason or anyone directly, I don’t know who does and who doesn’t have a technical background. But clearly the foundation as a collective has failed to grasp nem’s shortcomings, which I guess I would too if I were under the impression that Catapult would bring 4ktps. Any person with technical understanding of nem and blockchains in general would have known immediately that this number must be for the private version.

[thilon]

@ memario I hope to hear such feedback. This will make NEM better.

[chopper71]

I’ve been struggling to understand the Pro’s and Con’s of On Chain vs Off Chain Smart Contracts in terms of how it impacts Real World Use Cases. Has anyone got another view on this ?

[memario]

The gist is this…

Actual smart contracts run on all nodes on the network, which makes them inredibly inefficient. Inefficiency is an inherent shortcoming with most decentralized technology, since if things are supposed to be truly decentralized, all participants must be able to do all calculations themselves.
In addition to that there’s a problem with putting code on the blockchain. Even if you disregard the learning curve for a new proprietary language (which to be fair isn’t required for all platforms), bugs become a much bigger issue. With centralized code you can fix that bug and be done. However if the code is on the chain, you need to 1 post a new fixed version of the contract and 2 tell everyone to use that new version and hope everyone does. This can be a massive issue.

Now what nem calls off-chain smart contracts is really just any piece of software that uses it’s API to interact with the chain. This is much more efficient as it doesn’t have to be evaluated by everybody, it is however entirely centralized or distributed at best.

It mostly comes down to a discussion on whether decentralization is desirable and more importantly worth it. Everyone building a service has to make that call, but here’s an important point: You can have centralized services on e.g. eth and nem, however if you do want decentralization you can’t use nem unless it already supports your specific use-case (i.e. multi-sig, mosaic, …).

This is also why the comparison between nem and eth was so silly. The 2 simply don’t compare, period.

[memario]

What are the shortcomings in your opinion?

I think I pointed them out in my post

Ps: what is an If statement? Why should existing organizations or even startups put their business logic in a decentralized smart contract?

I don’t know what you mean by “what is an if statement”. Could you elaborate on that ?

It depends on the specific use case. If you want/need true decentralization then you’ll want to put the code on the chain. This can be great both for transparancy and resiliency.

[jason.lee]

We should know how to use NEM blockchain to solve the industry’s problems, and what benefits it brings to the industry.

Yes and this could be replicated and localised in the various regions.

NEM has a few great selling propositions that need to be communicated properly:

1. Hard coded smart contracts + APIs --> as you say, more secure and easier to integrate & use, but also more efficient since on protocol level without overhead of additional smart contract!
2. Combination of private and public chains with APIs and Atomic Swap functionality --> tackling privacy, speed issues, settlement through public chains

Documentation for NEM 2 is getting better and better. I also like the prototyping tool https://nemtech.github.io

Thanks, this could be the areas we could focus on plus more.

IMHO nem’s only real play is to become the cheapest and easiest to use

Thanks for your feedback @memario, if that is going to be a good selling point, then we should really take this as the ‘ground-up’ push to make sure we continue to be relevant and leading.

It mostly comes down to a discussion on whether decentralization is desirable and more importantly worth it. Everyone building a service has to make that call, but here’s an important point: You can have centralized services on e.g. eth and nem, however if you do want decentralization you can’t use nem unless it already supports your specific use-case (i.e. multi-sig, mosaic, …).

This is also why the comparison between nem and eth was so silly. The 2 simply don’t compare, period

Very interesting point, it could then mean not comparing NEM to Ethereum as much as pushing it as a hybrid way of managing your information with a mix of decentralisation and centralisation through off-chain smart contracts at play.

I’ve been struggling to understand the Pro’s and Con’s of On Chain vs Off Chain Smart Contracts in terms of how it impacts Real World Use Cases. Has anyone got another view on this ?

This could really be part of ‘case study’ to provide an understanding towards project considering NEM since what we have been touting has been the concept off-chain development which connects to NEM’s public blockchain through API integrations.

[chopper71]

It mostly comes down to a discussion on whether decentralization is desirable and more importantly worth it. Everyone building a service has to make that call, but here’s an important point: You can have centralized services on e.g. eth and nem, however if you do want decentralization you can’t use nem unless it already supports your specific use-case (i.e. multi-sig, mosaic, …).

This is also why the comparison between nem and eth was so silly. The 2 simply don’t compare, period.

Thanks for the detailed reply. This is the direction I was going with the question. To me the Real World use case of NEM is far more nuanced than simply one size fits all. For enterprise there are real concerns about going to a Public chain. I can also see how a hybrid approach of public/private centralised/decentralised may be a better solution to solve some problems. As you said it then becomes a question of whether implementation on NEM platform is possible. Happy to keep doing the research as plenty to learn !

[jason.lee]

I can also see how a hybrid approach of public/private centralised/decentralised may be a better solution to solve some problems

Agree. Can’t be disillusioned by the fact that everything just needs to be on the public chain. A healthy combination of the private and public chain for NEM will be crucial in developing enterprise confidence. We will need to develop solid case studies beside announcements on how we can achieve all these globally and we scale as well. Outcome is utilisation of NEM’s feature and technology all across.