Insolar: Open-Source Blockchain

The blockchain space continues to expand. Many blockchain entities will likely not survive in the next few years.  Yet some of them will become dominant.

It’s too early to determine which will be the winners.  It’s even possible that the future’s largest blockchains have yet to be established.

If we look to the internet and the worldwide web as a potential frame of reference, we might cite WordPress as an example of success for websites.  The internet has its roots in the 1960’s and gained massive adoption in the 1990’s with the introduction of the worldwide web.  WordPress is a web hosting platform that was established in 2003 as an open-source and free online software solution, which has since become the dominant website platform on the web.

It’s not inconceivable that an open-source blockchain could follow a similar trajectory, although such is not guaranteed, since there are a number of factors that can bring about massive adoption, not the least among them being ease of execution, security and cost.

Hence, it’s interesting to see Insolar describe itself as “building an open-source enterprise-grade blockchain platform to enable seamless interactions between companies and new growth opportunities powered by distributed trust.”

Insolar further states that “its code is open source and its research is freely shared; it supports the most popular enterprise languages (Golang and Java); and it allows 3rd party microservices, dApps, and smart contracts.”

Additionally, “Insolar doesn’t require expensive upfront investments in IT labor and infrastructure to deploy; it can be run on the cloud, securely and scalably.”

In this article, Insolar is launching a new blockchain-as-a-service platform, the company outlines their “fourth generation” technology as “an open-source, enterprise-grade blockchain platform and ecosystem that helps companies rapidly and affordably deploy distributed business networks.”

I will be interested to see if Insolar , or some other open-source blockchain, can make a name for itself in the space.