FLETA — Providing Blockchain as a Service — Part.2

The Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) model is one of the most in-demand business models in the world right now. BaaS vendors provide services like user authentication, database management, remote updating, and push notifications (for mobile apps), cloud storage, and hosting. Several companies have started providing BaaS services like Microsoft with Azure and R3. In this article, we are going to see how companies benefited from the incorporation of BaaS and how FLETA is looking to revolutionize this space with their Gateway Protocol.

Successful BaaS Integrations

Case Study #1: 3M and Azure

The 3M Company is an American multinational conglomerate corporation operating in the fields of industry, worker safety, health care, and consumer goods. Since they are one of the major players in the pharmaceutical business, they are well aware of the “counterfeit medication” problem.

When you look at a particular tablet, how do you know for sure that is made of the correct ingredients?

As much as you would want to believe otherwise, the fact remains that the market is flooded with counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Oscar Naim, the Lead Software Architecture Specialist at 3M, says, “Counterfeit pharmaceuticals are a $200 billion problem that impacts bottom lines and threatens public safety.”

To counter this problem, 3m turned to Microsoft Azure to boost their supply chain via blockchain integration. The company created a new solution concept, which uses blockchain on Azure with Azure SQL Database for storage.

By leveraging the blockchain’s transparency, 3M will be saving huge amounts of time and money in tracking down counterfeit pharmaceuticals. As Naim puts it:

“3M combined tamper-evident prototype labels with blockchain on Azure to create a label-as-a-service supply chain solution concept that can help identify counterfeits, protect business performance, and enhance consumer safety.”

Case Study #2: 50 banks and R3 Corda

A little over a week back, more than 50 banks, including ABN Amro, Standard Chartered, ING, got together and participated in tests of a trade finance application called Voltron. Voltron was developed by R3, using their Corda platform, and it creates a simulated letter of credit transactions.

As per R3, the main aim behind Voltron’s creation is to improve “the trade finance process by simplifying letter of credit transactions to deliver speedy settlement times and resolution of discrepancies, as well as improved sanctions screening.”

During the testing, the banks who were based across 27 countries, used Voltron to conduct processes which are traditionally paper-based and takes approximately 5–10 days. They found out that Voltron could process these transactions within 24 hours, saving a humongous amount of time and money. The trial was delivered on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in a collaboration between Bain, CryptoBLK, and R3.

According to the test results, R3 found out that 96% of the trial participants concluded that Voltron would help them improve trade finance processes and reduce costs.

Alfa Bank’s head of innovations, Denis Dodon, said, “Everything is done in the same interface, which is connected to all the workflow participants, information is shared instantly, what will significantly expedite the transaction, optimizing working with documents, which could be rectified in an instant way should there be any discrepancies identified.”

As per R3, the most significant advantages of Voltron are:

• Higher speed: Voltron removes time-consuming reconciliation processes by providing a single, immutable record of a trade.
• More reliability.
• Cost-effectiveness.
• Reduction in fraud risk.

R3 CEO David E. Rutter believes that Voltron, and the way banks came together to hold the trial, is a “step closer to shaping what the future of trade finance looks like.”

FLETA and the Gateway Protocol

We have talked about FLETA’s Gateway services in detail before, which you can read over here. FLETA’s Gateway system allows different projects to interact with each other. Its innate scalable architecture, which utilizes the novel Proof-of-Formulator consensus protocol assures high throughput and low latency. However, what is genuinely unique about FLETA’s Gateway is that it will permit all projects to use the FLETA service chain, which is both fast and cheap.

Let’s do a quick overview of the advantages of FLETA’s Gateway Protocol:

• FLETA already utilizes a proven and fast consensus mechanism.
• FLETA’s service chain provides a BaaS service which is fast, cheap and is built on strong fundamentals.
• FLETA’s robust architecture and design (validator nodes) will help bring in added security to your project.
• Projects have the freedom to set the transactions for free so that users can use the chain without any expenses.

Conclusion

FLETA’s Gateway protocol provides a unique BaaS service, which is extremely fast and cheap for companies to use. We believe that by leveraging FLETA’s innate scalable architecture, the companies will receive a massive boost to their operations and functionality.