Blockchain has transitioned from hype to reality as companies adopt distributed ledger solutions to drive business value. However, blockchain skills still need to be improved, forcing firms to look offshore to build their capabilities. Partnering with specialized offshore blockchain developers enables access to talent and cost efficiencies while accelerating innovation.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Blockchain provides transformational ways to enhance trust, transparency, and integrity across transactions and data exchange. Despite early criticisms, blockchain is gaining mainstream adoption for uses like supply chain tracking, digital identity, payments, credentialing, and provenance assurance.
Offshore Partners Provide Blockchain Expertise
To capitalize on blockchain’s promise, companies need development talent to design decentralized applications and smart contract-based platforms. However, qualified blockchain engineers are extremely rare. Less than 20% of software engineers have blockchain skills today. Offshore development center have invested in blockchain training to expand their expertise.
Leading companies have begun forming partnerships focused on offshore blockchain development. These partnerships provide significant benefits.
Cost Savings
Offshore blockchain engineers are available at hourly rates ranging from $20 to $50, depending on country and skill level. This represents savings of 40% to 70% compared to domestic US blockchain engineering rates. Providers are able to achieve economies of scale by maintaining large dedicated blockchain teams and spreading fixed costs across multiple clients.
Expertise Access
Offshore vendors have invested significantly in blockchain training and certification to build specialized capabilities. They maintain talent pools of certified blockchain developers across platforms like Hyperledger, Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, and more. This degree of blockchain expertise is difficult to build and maintain internally for most companies.
Accelerated Innovation
Prototyping blockchain concepts with external specialized teams enables faster experimentation and proof of concepts. Rather than attempting to reskill internal teams on emerging blockchain skills, companies can tap offshore partners to get started quickly. This avoids diverting existing talent and delays.
Flexibility
Partnering with offshore blockchain providers allows capacity to be dynamically scaled up and down based on changing initiative needs. During the proof of concepts and initial development stages, smaller teams with specific blockchain expertise can be engaged. As solutions mature and scale increases, offshore team size can expand easily. Companies need to avoid the overhead of underutilized internal blockchain teams between initiatives.
Productivity
Because offshore teams are distributed across global time zones, collaboration can happen literally around the clock. New features and fixes can be built overnight and handed off each day, accelerating development cycles. Distributed teams also bring a diversity of thought and problem-solving perspectives.
Enhanced Focus
Relying on offshore blockchain specialists enables internal developers to maintain concentration on core platform capabilities and features. Rather than attempting to build internal skills across emerging technologies like blockchain, gamification, IoT, etc., they can remain focused on product domains with the highest business value.
Wide Range of Offshore Blockchain Services
Offshore blockchain teams can provide services spanning:
- Design services. Architect smart contracts, protocols, consensus models, wallets, decentralized storage, oracles, frameworks, and governance policies.
- Full stack development. Implement blockchain applications across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and DevOps. Integrate with legacy systems.
- QA and testing. Conduct security audits, functionality testing, performance testing, and network stress testing across nodes.
- Deployment and maintenance. Provide ongoing management of networks, wallets, applications, and infrastructure.
- Support services. Supply help desk, troubleshooting, and technical support services for end users.
Managing Offshore Delivery
Managing offshore blockchain teams does require overcoming delivery risks. Careful provider selection, contractual protections, defined processes around security and testing, and ongoing governance are essential. However, the expertise gains and accelerated innovation possible make offshore blockchain development partnerships well worth the effort.
Conclusion
With blockchain moving into the mainstream, offshore talent provides a fast track to implement decentralized solutions. Partnering with specialized providers solves blockchain skills gaps cost-effectively while driving innovation and marketplace advantages.
