Blockchain consultant for the Mittelstand in Germany

Does your product need a blockchain?

It needs one when several parties write to the same record and none of them should control it alone. A blockchain is a shared record that no single party can change afterward. For data that one company owns and its customers trust, a database costs less to run and can be corrected.

Often the question comes from outside, from a partner who proposes a shared ledger or a customer who asks about tokens. An answer before the first budget saves a firm a project it does not need.

Seven questions before a blockchain project

Answer them for your use case before our call. Yes answers to the first three make the case for a chain; the last four shape how it is built.

Question	If yes	If no
Do several companies write to the same record?	A shared ledger is worth a look	A database with an audit log does the job
Would any of them object if one party ran the database?	The chain replaces the party nobody wants in charge	The party the others trust runs a database
Must outsiders be able to check the record?	A public chain	A permissioned ledger or a database
Does a smart contract need data from outside the chain, such as a price?	An oracle network, planned from the start	No oracle needed
Does the record hold personal data?	The data stays off the chain, and only its fingerprint (a hash) goes on it, because a chain cannot delete an entry	The data can go on the chain
Will a token change hands?	A lawyer checks the regulation early, and the token gets an identifier under ISO 24165	Tokens stay out of the first version
Must your customers hold a crypto wallet?	Plan how they get one, and test that step with real customers	The chain stays behind your app, out of sight

What I have run on blockchains

At the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital I was Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then Chief Information Officer. The company was a node operator in an oracle network that delivers market data to smart contracts, above all to decentralized exchanges. I took over the operation of those nodes and their documentation, built up the node operations team and later moved the infrastructure from Azure to another cloud with failover.

With colleagues from several teams I created a market data product for institutional users: real-time and historical trading data on hundreds of liquid and illiquid digital assets (asset count at the launch in 2022). Customers can see how a price was determined and which trades the outlier detection flagged. As CIO I helped write its terms, price definitions and API methodologies, the documents a bank’s compliance team reads before it signs.

I have attended more than 250 blockchain events, and I write about digital assets as an editor at the business magazine Business Punk.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, an IT architect in Frankfurt with more than twenty years in IT and media. Before blockchains became my job I built life insurance portals and a search for a real estate database. Finance, insurance and real estate are the fields where I look for blockchain business models. Details: Working with blockchains.