IoT + Hyperledger Development from scratch within 21 days — Day 3
Welcome
Hello readers! In the previous article IoT + Hyperledger Development from scratch within 21 days — Day 2 we write about key concepts in the Hyperledger Fabric, in this article we will write about real-world examples developed on the Hyperledger Fabric.
Hyperledger is, in fact, a fabric from which many blockchain solutions can be woven. But its main purpose is to facilitate collaboration among multiple businesses in different industries, as you read the first article you know that was built for that by Linux and IBM.
The efficiency and protection it provides are valued in many industries, including health, education, and finance, and the number of its use cases grows day by day.
In this article we will walk through its most prominent use cases, starting with abstract and finishing with practical ones.
Business contracts
Hyperledger enables privacy control for business-to-business contracts. It means that:
- It provides protection of sensitive information from outside parties that have access to a ledger.
- Makes certain contracts visible and discoverable by all parties on a ledger.
Asset depository
Dematerialized assets allow direct access for all stakeholders and allow them to initiate trades and acquire information. This should be done in real time.
Also, asset creators and participants should be able to add business rules to any asset and to make that rules either public or private.
Supply chain
All participants on the network should be able to:
- input and track sourcing of raw materials
- record manufacturing parts
- track the provenance of goods through shipping
- maintain immutable records of every stage in the production of a good — including storage, sales and everything that comes afterward
As in Business contracts and Asset depository use cases, it is important to provide participants in the Supply chain with the search function that goes back and forth between individual transaction layers.
There is one canonical use case of Hyperledger Fabric. It’s the management of the manufacturing supply chain and I will cover it in the next section.
The canonical use case in the manufacturing supply chain
There are two types of participants in the manufacturing supply chain: final assemblers (manufacturers) and part suppliers.
Final assemblers are the business entities that perform a final assembly of a product, eg. automobile manufacturers and construction companies.
Part suppliers, as their name suggests, are supplying parts to the final assembler, but they can also act as an assembler to their sub-suppliers. In that case, they are assembling the product and sending it to the final assembler. That’s where the things get more complex and tracking of provenance becomes harder.
What if, for example, a car manufacturer needs to recall some of the vehicles due to safety issues with a particular part? That final assembler would greatly benefit from the possibility to search backward through as many as 5–10 transaction layers.
Despite the complex nature of a supply chain where part suppliers can also be assemblers for their sub-suppliers, a car manufacturer would be able to quickly respond to the issue. That would be the greatest benefit in this canonical use case of Hyperledger Fabric.
It can provide a standard protocol which allows every participant on a supply chain network to input and track numbered parts used for the production of a particular vehicle.
Key Components
- Payment upon delivery of goods — Integration with off-chain payment systems is required, so that payment instruction can be sent when parts are received.
- Third-party Audit — All supplied parts must be auditable by third parties. For example, regulators might need to track the total number of parts supplied by a specific supplier, for tax accounting purposes.
- Obfuscation of shipments — Balances must be obfuscated so that no supplier can deduce the business activities of any other supplier.
- Validation Access — Only nodes with validation rights are allowed to validate transactions (shipment of parts).
- View access — Only accounts with view access rights are allowed to interrogate balances of shipped parts and available parts.
Real Use Cases of Hyperledger Fabric
Now, let’s look at some of the real use cases of Hyperledger Fabric. There are many of them, but some provide great examples of benefits which a business can get from its permissioned membership, protection, and scalability.
Streamlined Supply Chains
The supply chain in the food industry, according to Walmart’s VP of Food Safety Frank Yiannas, is being tracked by systems that “don’t speak to each other.” One big retailer as Walmart couldn’t really track all the products on its shelves because of that.
And, as in the car manufacturing example, that can prove to be an issue when some safety concern is raised. It is therefore of vital importance to track every product right from the start and to be able to identify what the product is, what are its ingredients, and where it all came from.
Blockchain-based Platform for Trade Financing
According to the Japanese Mizuho Financial Group, the blockchain-based solution can provide these benefits to the world of trade financing:
- Shortening of the deal processing time (from a couple of days to just 2 hours)
- Saving on labor costs
- Increasing transparency through document digitization.
That’s why they are working with IBM again, this time on a Hyperledger Fabric solution for conducting all of their trade transactions. The system would enable all parties to view the latest shipment data. And the final result would be cutting the costs of trade transaction and processing.
Blockchain for Smart Energy Management
Some areas lack the electricity while others have it in abundance. That kind of inefficient allocation is being tackled by Hyperledger Fabric permissioned membership network.
In essence, Smart Energy Management means that automated and decentralized systems will drive the allocation of electricity in the grid. With a growing number of consumers becoming producers of energy, it is important to make sure that the energy surplus from one household is efficiently allocated to the grid, and that the producer gets to keep as much profit from the transactions as possible.
The supply chain for Pharmaceuticals
Security concerns and complexity of production in pharmacy are much more pronounced than in the food industry. It’s no wonder that Chinese conglomerate Sichuan Heijia partnered up with IBM to build blockchain-based supply platform for pharmaceuticals.
Again, it is all about tracking the transactions and participants in the supply chain and making sure that some deals remain private while some become visible to all parties on a ledger. Those features have allowed, among other things, for the payment period to be shortened. Small and middle-sized pharmaceutical retailers became more liquid and the whole system thus more efficient.
Health data exchange
The initial focus of this project led by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and IBM will be on oncology-related data. But the final goal is to enable patients to share their data with researchers and healthcare providers. In other words, they are aiming to provide a solution to the issue of health data exchange that would satisfy the two most important requirements:
- Privacy for patients
- Efficient and scalable exchange for researchers and providers
Conclusion
Hyperledger is becoming more than a solution for existing business issues. It is becoming a way of organizing business and manufacture. Many different industries are experiencing the shift from old, centralized and inefficient models plagued by privacy and safety concerns, to the new system of improved safety, transparency and efficiency. Hyperledger is built for high-scaling enterprise applications, but it’s also proven to be a network with enormous potential, the one which almost every business can benefit from.
Stay sharp, and see ya in the next article!
Read IoT + Hyperledger Development introduction article — Day 1
Read IoT + Hyperledger Development Key Concepts — Day 2
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