Amazon Blockchain is Getting an Upgrade
If AWS is the dominant Cloud solution it’s getting better at blockchain as well. Blockchain-as-a-service (BAAS) is getting two new upgrades.
Already on On November 13, Amazon was granted two crypto-related patents.
During Amazon’s reinvest 2018 conference in Las Vegas on November 28th, 2018 Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced the launch of 2 blockchain products: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain.
This officially positions Amazon as the leading Cloud player for Blockchain.
In October, 2018 Qtum, the public blockchain project designed to help enterprise businesses implement and utilize blockchain technology, has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in China.
Amazon will offer Amazon Quantum Ledger Database and Amazon Managed Blockchain for developers using its cloud-computing services. Apparently, Jassy explained that AWS spent a great deal of time speaking with hundreds of customers about what they wanted out of blockchain technology. In doing so, AWS discovered that organizations want to use blockchains over traditional databases because traditional databases can’t solve all their problems.
If you are going to win in the Cloud, you have to also win Blockchain-as-a-service. Amazon sees plenty of opportunity with blockchain technology.
- QLDB is a solution for a ledger with a centralized trusted entity struggled with existing blockchain frameworks due to scaling issues and clarity with the existing frameworks.
- AWS created the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) to help customers conduct transactions with a centralized trusted entity.
- According to Jassy, QLDB is immutable, cryptographically verifiable, transparent, and very fast.
- Blockchain is only expected to achieve “wide-spread adoption” by 2025.
So Amazon in 2018 could even be seen as somewhat of a pioneer as compared to Microsoft, Google and Alibaba in this regard. While IBM was first, Amazon can do blockchain better now.
The recent patents have to do with “signature delegation” and the patents are circa 2015, so Amazon has been on to this for quite a while. With it Amazon’s filing proposes a “grid encoding technique,” using groups of collected “shards,” where each shard represents a logical distribution of data items stored in a given grid.
What I like about this move is AWS is responding to demand from existing customers. Amazon could use this in the area of mortgages, health-care records, supply chain tracking and vehicle history records as common customer use cases.
In April 2018, Amazon won a patent for a subscription feed system described as a “streaming data marketplace.” Amazon first patents date back to 2012, so it’s not like they have been sleeping on this technology.
