Further — Enterprise or Public Blockchain
Businesses are starting to put pilot teams together to understand how distributed ledgers work and what the implications are for their businesses. We’re on the verge of some very interesting business models emerging from this. — McKinsey
We witnessed the development of many more end-user-oriented blockchain projects in the last year, especially with ICOs. With incredible increasing valuation of crypto moneys, awareness has increased considerably in this direction. With increasing awareness and available money, infrastructure investments for blockchain technology have also increased. I think, some of these projects will be very interesting and successful, touching very different areas.
Future of Enterprise Blockchain
10% of the Global GDP will be stored in blockchain technology by 2027 — World Economic Forum
Distributed ledgers are important for unlocking the cumulative power of ecosystems, which are increasingly a focus for businesses. However, ecosystems don’t happen at scale yet because of the difficulties getting different data systems to speak to each other with current technology. Distributed ledgers are the key ingredient to enable that level of communication and analysis.
$176 Billion business value-add of blockchain by 2025 — Gartner Webinar
Distributed ledgers can help to address many challenges of enterprise problems to add value, such as:
- Enabling trust in peer-to-peer B2B transactions, while avoiding the cost and risks of intermediaries
- Reducing manual, error-prone information exchange and processes across enterprise boundaries
- Avoiding the cost and delays of offline reconciliations
- Decreasing the cost and high risk of fraud from cross-company transactions
Enterprise Platform Alternatives
Meanwhile, blockchain platforms for enterprise has becoming more mature in the last year. Linux Foundation and numerous companies started an open source collaboration effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. The first production ready platform, Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, was released in July
After Fabric, second production ready platform, Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0, was released in January 2018.
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance was also established to how the public version of Ethereum could be used for the corporate world and how it should be structured according to the needs of the corporate world.
There are a few other solutions that can be used as alternatives to these solutions such as Corda, Stellar.
Which criterias we focus for Further Network
Performance at scale
Most real-world blockchains do not even approach 100 tps — bitcoin averages 7 tps and ethereum is about twice that, while the transaction wait times (latency) can run into minutes or hours. Enterprise blockchains not only need much higher throughput, but also transaction latency of less than a second for many businesses use cases.
In 2016, 3.7 billion airline tickets were sold. Even if we accept that all tickets are evenly distributed over time, it is possible to see 120 tickets per second sold.
But of course it can easily be understood that in many cases it has reached higher figures. For Further Network we will need much more transaction per seconds.
Resilience
Further Network will deal with ticket delivery, settlement between B2B parts, payment issues, peer to peer ticket transfer and process smart travel records.
So Further Network will be built to avoid downtime with highly available services and to recover rapidly when (not if) some components fail. Avoiding small issues leading to major outages and quick recovery from failure are key to ensuring high availability in any business-critical system.
Security and confidentiality
Enterprise blockchains start with a permissioned network model, meaning that all members are known legal entities and must be enrolled though membership services, which issue enrollment certificates.
In Further Network, each asset is created by asset creator and each transaction on the network is executed on a channel, where each party must be authenticated and authorized to transact on that channel.
And Further Network blockchain must have the ability to conduct confidential transactions, e.g., using channels in Hyperledger Fabric, which insulate peer nodes and maintain private ledgers that are only accessible to other peers on the same channel.
Conclusion
We think that it is better to use an enterprise blockchain platform when we are considering the speed, security and privacy needs that we need. Hyperledger Fabric is the best solution for us nowadays.
