A look at blockchains as a service

The adoption of blockchain has been growing rapidly. While there are significant efforts in improving the scalability of blockchains, there are some solutions that work around the technical difficulties of scaling instead. Given that most scaling solutions necessarily involve some extent of trade-offs, a subset of blockchain solutions has instead gone in the direction of giving developers the ability to optimize that tradeoff for themselves.

The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Bitcoin, has a very specific function: to serve as a decentralized distributed ledger technology that provides a censorship-resistant record where double spending is cost-prohibitive. Apart from the main drawbacks of high energy consumption and low transaction throughput, Bitcoin does not allow for complex programs to be built atop it. For one, the smart contract programming language that Bitcoin uses, Script, is limited in versatility.