While blockchain remains something that can bring advantages to businesses, especially in relation to supply chains, the implementation for enterprise deployment remains elusive. This is demonstrated through a CNBC report which showed that only eight percent of open-source blockchain projects are still active.
The reason for this is a relatively immature technology which remains relatively costly and complex. Moreover, many businesses lack the necessary skills for a successful implementation. To add to this, there can be a scarcity in resources hinder chief information officers and developers in their attempts to build out blockchain-empowered applications.
This means that many companies turn to blockchain infrastructure partners to help provide the necessary tools for manifesting proof-of-concepts and building deployable solutions in line with business requirements. To illustrate how this might work in practice, we look at five examples.
Smart contracts
An example is with Ethereum, which has a service geared around smart contracts for data.
Ethereum pioneered the “smart contract” by allowing programming as part of its block formation data. Ethereum is a public blockchain with over 20,000 active miners and its set-up is suited for industry specific use cases where strong tamper-resistance and public transparency are essential. Ethereum uses POW (Proof of Work) as its mining protocol.
Plug-and-play
A separate example comes from Hyperledger Fabric, which produces plug-and-play blockchain for business projects. Hyperledger Fabric is one of the eight ongoing Linux Foundation blockchain projects, and the company has contributed to by IBM and Digital Asset. With the “plug-and-play” modular framework businesses can define unique blockchain characteristics such as consensus and permission rules.
Distributed ledgers for finance
A third case is with R3 Corda, which is a permissioned Distributed Ledger for finance. With this blockchain, participants focus on interoperability and integrations with financial agreements and their relevant legal documentation. This makes R3 Corda suitable for designing a permissioned distributed ledger to record and manage financial agreements.
Currency exchange and stack applications
A fourth example is Ripple, which is a global payments provider. Ripple is focused on providing a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network. The fifth example is FlureeDB, which is a blockchain database for full-stack applications. FlureeDB is designed to solve common data storage problem for enterprise blockchain applications.
