A decision tree for building IT applications: What to choose: blockchain or classical systems?

Blockchain technology has gained increasing attention from research and industry over the recent years. It allows implementing in its environment the smart-contracts technology which is used to automate and execute agreements between users. The blockchain is proposed today as a new technical infrastructure for several types of IT applications. This interest is mainly due to its core property that allows two users to perform transactions without going through a Trusted Third Party, while offering a transparent and fully protected data storage. However, a blockchain comes along a number of other intrinsic properties, which may not be suitable or beneficial in all the envisaged application cases. Consequently, we propose in this paper to design a new tool which is “a decision tree” that allows identifying when a blockchain may be the appropriate technical infrastructure for a given IT application, and when another classical system (centralized or distributed peer-to-peer) is more adapted. The proposed decision tree allows also identifying whether or not it is necessary to use the smart-contracts technology.