The blockchain is hot. Everyone, including a guy who’s remotely attached to the technology world, has been discussing it voraciously. For a majority of enthusiasts, blockchain is all about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. However, cryptocurrency is just an example of many applications that can run on the blockchain.
Globally, blockchain adoption and its implementation are being debated aggressively. The potential of the technology is immense, and research firm Gartner recently estimated that the business value added by blockchain would grow to slightly over $176 billion by 2025 and then surge to exceed $3.1 trillion by 2035.
Despite the optimism, chaos and unrelenting noise, space has yet to see a major implementation at production scale.
From a developers perspective; the scarcity of required skills, limitation of smart contract programming models, poor key, wallet management and the lack of tooling are some of the major challenges in developing blockchain-based solutions.
Elemential: Creating a backbone for ‘stack blockchain’
For an instance, blockchain administration currently takes a developer 100 plus hours every week to manage. Starting from node deployment and configuration to maintenance activities such as ensuring run-time and language dependencies. One misstep breaks the entire network and could cause the loss of extremely valuable data and audit trails.
This risk alone was enough to keep an organization such as the National Stock Exchange of India from taking blockchain seriously. With the help of Elemential, a Mumbai-based platform that enables any developer to build and manage blockchain applications at scale, NSE has been putting blockchain for insulations against loss and security of data.
The brainchild of Raunaq Vaisoha, Anil Dukkipatty, and Sahil Kathpal, Elemential’s flagship product Hadron aims to break the blockchain administration barrier for developers. “This would enable them a team with the right use-case idea to run a blockchain network at production without any hiccups, all in one click,” explains Raunaq.
Hadron: A linear learning curve for blockchain developers
At present, there a multiplicity of blockchain stacks with varying consensus protocols and logic layers that can be used to execute a use-case based on requirements. For example, a use-case involving private data and communications amongst nodes such as banking use-cases are best deployed on Hyperledger Fabric.
This means a developer is tasked with an exponential learning curve that comes along with maintaining a working familiarity with multiple blockchain stacks. “This introduces a big risk of human error and a high preparation time for mundane, yet important tasks,” highlights Raunaq.
Elemential’s blockchain administration tool, Hadron, focuses on making this exponential learning curve a linear one. “We do this by eliminating all the complex, repetitive tasks that a developer needs to undertake while deploying a blockchain network and maintain it at production levels,” adds Sahil.
The company is focused on being open, accessible to any developer at affordable and flexible pricing structure. “We also have flipped the model by focusing on charging for the value we provide in administering chains as opposed to for application development,” says Sahil.
Raising funding and winning large contracts
While there are many startups who raise capital from blue-chip investors in the early stage, Elemential has been able to raise a substantial seed round led by Matrix Partners even before the product wasn’t ready.
Investopad, Lightspeed India Partners, Digital Currency Group, Hinduja Group, Eight Innovate and several notable angels such as Amrish Rau, Amit Ranjan, Prashant Malik also participated in the round.
Importantly, the company was also AngelList India’s first syndicate.
Besides NSE, Elemential also has on-boarded large customers including a large Registrar and Transfer Agent company and also conducted a KYC blockchain application for over nine banks in India.
Why Entrackr sees disruptions via Elemential?
Elemential weeds out the complexities involved in deploying trusted systems and administration on stack blockchain. Currently, blockchains such as Ethereum have over 1.1 million users and over 820 trusted applications. There are also over 700 token chains at present.
Elemential’s vision is to capture the rapidly growing market for trusted applications, by offering the best experience for administering blockchain, which is a fundamental need for all the developers.
On the lines of WordPress that begin with a simple mission of making website development and deployment easy, Elemential is eyeing to disrupt blockchain deployment and administration easy for developers. When WordPress started in 2003, there were 40 million websites; at present, there are over a billion web apps.
WordPress was extremely successful by being the best experience for web developers, to the extent that 3 out of 10 websites are made on WordPress. “We intend to emulate its success,” concludes Raunaq.
Elemential: Website
