Hyperledger Grid to Aid Supply Chains with Blockchain Components
The recently incubated project includes tools and sample apps for agriculture, retail, etc. Learn about what’s being done by Cargill, Intel, Bitwise IO, and Target.
Bringing in reusability
Developing blockchains for supply chain applications isn’t always simple, especially when building everything from scratch. There isn’t a lot of reusable components and frameworks that exist in the Hyperledger ecosystem, as well as other platforms that enable developers to quickly create supply chain–centric solutions.
This is the particular problem, which Grid, a project that’s currently in the incubation stage of the Hyperledger project, is trying to solve. Grid is an ecosystem of technologies, frameworks, and libraries that allow developers to choose which components are best for their blockchain applications.
During a Hyperledger special interest group (SIG) conference call on June 6, 2019, David Cecchi of Cargill provided an overview of the project, bringing up the issue of reusability of blockchain components and frameworks and the lack thereof.
“We learned of this problem by implementing a bunch of different solutions across various industries. Our engineers would look for reusable libraries, frameworks, domain models, or standards, and they didn’t exist. What we have were a lot of very capable, flexible platforms that are very effective, but are not equipped with prebuilt components or other things that could be reused.”
— David Cecchi, Cargill
Cargill is an agricultural conglomerate based in the United States, working on the project together with other vendors.
What is Grid?
Grid is a platform for building supply chain solutions based on distributed ledger components. It was initially proposed to the Hyperledger project back in December 2018. Hyperledger later accepted and placed Grid into incubation in January 2019. Since then, the major contributors of the project have been Cargill, Intel, and Bitwise IO. On April 22, 2019, a retail giant Target announced plans to support the development of Grid, as well.
Based on the proposal, Grid will offer the following features:
- It includes higher-level abstractions that are fundamentally not provided by lower-level blockchains, such as supply chain–specific data types, data models, and standards.
- It provides solutions to solve problems related to multi-party interactions, such as security and identity.
- It assembles various components across the Hyperledger ecosystem to make an actual functioning stack.
During the SIG presentation, David emphasized a couple of important distinctions about Grid:
- Grid is not a blockchain, but it uses the technology.
- Grid is not an application, but developers can use Grid frameworks to build software.
“What Grid does is empowering developers to get more choices as they build an application, to select components from Grid to use in supply chain–centric applications, to allow for commonality between applications, and to allow for rapid deployment.”
— David Cecchi, Cargill
For more details, read the full article.
