Turning the "fat protocol" on its side: Making the case for simple distributed ledgers

The “fat protocol” view of blockchains and ICOs is a decentralized take on highly valued network effects common in successful tech businesses. B2C consumer and B2B enterprise network effects have different benefits and value. Valentin Bercovici explains how diversity of horizontal enterprise machine learning use cases drives the creation of data platforms, which necessarily abstract details of underlying hardware and software stacks. Historical examples include SQL, ODBC/JDBC, and HTTP/REST.

Blockchain stacks are no different. A minority of enterprise use cases are related to financial, payment, settlement or “exchange of value business” requirements. On the other hand, the majority of enterprise use cases, machine learning or otherwise, deal with BPA and next-gen RPA in administration, engineering, finance, HR, manufacturing, marketing, sales, shipping, support, and other corporate departments. In those scenarios, a simple distributed ledger (SDL) offers the right combination of blockchain value to serve diverse enterprise workflows while abstracting away the governance, economic, security, development, implementation, and other operational details of multiple underlying blockchain specifics. Valentin covers several real-world enterprise machine learning examples of where simple distributed ledgers have delivered more rapid time to value than regular “fat protocol” blockchains.