Cloud-based Blockchain: Hijacking The Idea Of Decentralization

By Othman Darwish

BaaS or what is known as Blockchain-as-a-Service- is a cloud-based solution, that developed by companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM which dominating the industry of cloud computing.  The model of BaaS provider is promoting and offering businesses to select between a diversity of blockchain platforms, and tackle the complexity of configuring, operating and maintaining the entire blockchain infrastructure. In this blog will opposing the rationality of adopting such a deployment model, and debating some fundamental and conflicting aspects of blockchain technology and BaaS deployment model.        

Microsoft and its dominant cloud platform Azure was the first software vendor to offer BaaS. Azure provides a variety of blockchain platforms, such as HyperLedger Fabric, Ethereum, Corda, SysCoin and many more. Such services that provide pre-built templates to build blockchain networks dragged businesses to go with BaaS proposal, to decrease their development time and cost, and streamline the integration with existing cloud infrastructure and services, that needed during application development. BaaS interoperability with existing REST-based API and message-based API  made straightforward; the blockchain performed like a system integrated with another system forming covenant system-to-system business process. Scalability and availability of global and dominant cloud service provider is another factor that drives different businesses of the high demand of understanding of blockchain technology, and a confidant pathway that supports them to provide a newly innovated and competing products and services. IBM and its cloud blue mix platform go beyond delivering a blockchain infrastructure, by affording consultancy services in several industry use cases, from the supply chain, finance, banking, IoT, and manufacturing. The target to revolutionizing business and industries, and the way it works. IBM blockchain stimulates a consortium of businesses, by simplifying blockchain complexity, enable them to unlock new value, opportunity, and scale up competitive advantages.          

Decentralization is a fundamental aspect of any blockchain-base solution. At a fundamental level, decentralization is a core pillar that enables trustless entities to execute transactions,  establishing and forcing agreements between them, without the need for central authority, custody or a guarantee from a reputable entity. Take for example Bitcoin system as an example,  at primary level, Bitcoin is a unique database of money, that is hosted publicly over the internet, and despite that, no one managed to change or manipulate a single byte of it, without the authorization of the money owner. Bitcoin transactions exchanges are done in fully autonomous, self-executing instruction set — such radical shift relay fundamentally on decentralization power.  In decentralization model, regardless if it formed in a public or a private/consortium entities, each entity host a copy blockchain data and special type blockchain platform program, that upon the network participating entity agreement and consensus, the state of the blockchain data would be changed. In such a decentralized network, resiliency, scalability, and security are by a fundamental aspect of the network. 

Many could easily argue, that the cloud-based solution is designed to serve the above purposes,  so what the problem of that? One would argue that this is true, for any traditional centralized trust-base solution,  but not for blockchain decentralized solution; moving blockchain to cloud,  meaning  trusting of  BaaS provider, and it became a vital implicit participant of you business , and you have  only one option; blindly trust him. Moreover, this contradicts at the first place of the objective of moving to blockchain; forming a network of trustless entities without relying on a trusted entity.