Enterprise Blockchain Newsletter #8
Stories from Digital Asset and DAML, Forbes EY, R3 Corda and Hyperledger
It has been a while (exactly one month) since the last Enterprise Blockchain newsletter went out, so this Issue #8 will be heavily loaded with interesting DLT articles. I have been busy on my end with work and hadn’t had time to publish anything, but finally, here it is. There are great stories from Ernst & Young (EY) entering the space, Forbes releasing a huge report on $B dollar companies working with blockchain, Digital Asset making large steps and increasing DAML adoption, and stories from the usual suspects R3 and Hyperledger.
Forbes Blockchain 50
Forbes just released some great reporting on how and which of the large enterprises are using blockchain in their operations. The report features 50 companies with minimum revenues or valuations of $1 billion and significant US presence. The names include some of the biggest commercial players in the United States like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Fidelity, JPM Chase, IBM, Northern Trust, DTCC and many others. They even go into detail explaining what protocols each company uses. I have the feeling that this report will be included in a lot of startup decks showing enterprise blockchain traction and concept validation. Great reporting!
EY Releases ZKP Blockchain Transaction Technology to the Public Domain to Advance Blockchain Privacy Standards
The “Big Four” auditor EY just made a splash by releasing Nightfall, an ambitious bid to bring business to the public blockchain protocol Ethereum. They also released the so-called EY Smart Contract Analyzer, which is a software suite that users can leverage to test the security of smart contracts on Ethereum. On top of that they announced the new version of EY Blockchain Analyzer, which is designed to give clients all the tools necessary to facilitate enterprise-grade operations via blockchain. Currently the GitHub repository is still a placeholder but we all expect to see what will be released.
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Launches Blockchain-Neutral Token Taxonomy Initiative to Accelerate a Token-Powered Blockchain Future
EEA partnered with Microsoft, Digital Asset, R3 and Hyperledger in order to create a common cross-blockchain token composition framework. The need for such a framework is huge as businesses now just blindly copy either ERC20 or ERC721 and upgrade them with features on their own without following a particular standard. The issues come when the same tokens might be replicated or transferred to another blockchain which doesn’t have the same properties. Having one standardized GitHub with a common library will resolve those interoperability issues faster. One day we will easily see the same tokens existing on Quorum as well as Corda and Fabric.
Digital Asset & DAML:
This April was a solid month at Digital Asset with the company making serious efforts to increase the adoption of their smart contract framework called DAML. DA was pretty active and first open-sourced the DAML repository, giving access to everyone to use their SDK in their DLT stack. Then, they released their work with International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and open sourced the code for creating a wrapper for their Common Domain Model (CDM). The public repository includes both the CDM libraries and a sample application for the life cycle interest rate swaps (IRS) and credit default swaps (CDS) across their lifetime using ISDA's CDM including the CDM event specification module. This is a fairly important move as most of the financial services companies that deal with trading and managing derivatives would want to move to the CDM standard.
Last but not least, they announced that DAML will be integrated with Hyperledger Sawtooth. This is an interesting move as they have selected Sawtooth and not the more famous Fabric, which already has more established toolsets developed by IBM. I believe that Sawtooth will benefit from DAML as it does help with the portability of applications, but it also greatly improves the productivity of the developer by delivering language-level constructs that deal with boilerplate concerns like signatures, data schemas, and privacy.
https://hub.digitalasset.com/hubfs/Press%20Releases/DAML_Open_Source_Press_Release_4.4.19.pdf
https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2019/04/16/daml-smart-contracts-coming-to-hyperledger-sawtooth
R3 & Corda:
Developing with Corda 4
Dan Newton published a great post on how to start developing DLT applications with Corda 4. He covers topics like states, contracts, flows, sub-flows, and creating and initiating a transaction and the responder flow. Great read for anyone new to Corda.
https://lankydan.dev/developing-with-corda-4
Marco Polo Blockchain Built on R3’s Corda Sees First Live Trades
Marco Polo has been in the news a lot lately and they just had the first real complete transactions executed on the network. The next steps are executing transactions with a direct integration to the customers’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. In future, the network is planned to be expanded by further banks and participants from the transportation and insurance sectors so that the entire value chain for foreign trade transactions is represented digitally with data.
Will Businesses Ever Use Stablecoins?
R3’s research team did a great job with this stablecoin report. They touch on what is backing the stablecoin, if any collateral or algorithm, as well as how stablecoins would fit into the current payment rails and regulatory framework. Definitely worth the read!
https://www.r3.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/R3_Stablecoin_Mar2019-New.pdf
Hyperledger:
Does Hyperledger Fabric perform at scale?
There are valid concerns about the performance and scalability of Hyperledger Fabric, in particular with managing their channels, smart contracts and overall network management. Christopher Ferris, an IBM Fellow, goes on a mission to show us that Fabric does scale and it scales well. In this post his team spins off a 32-organization network that consists of 128 peer nodes and 325 channels, and the numbers are appearing good: They managed to achieve approximately 13k transactions per second. Still, some open questions remain when using their private transactions and regarding the limitations of their consensus protocols (Raft vs Kafka).
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2019/04/does-hyperledger-fabric-perform-at-scale/
Hyperledger Indy Graduates to Active Status and Is “Production Ready” Now
Hyperledger Indy is a decentralized identity protocol that aims to put the control of user data back in the hands of the users, thereby safeguarding data from privacy breaches and hacking. It provides a decentralized platform for issuing, storing, and verifying credentials that are transferable, private, and secure. This is great news for all enterprises who are looking for an identity solution.
General:
Identity: The Elephant in the Enterprise Blockchain Room
Jesus Rodriguez always has interesting thoughts to share on enterprise blockchain issues and protocols. Here I have included two of his latest articles, which are great for anyone who wants to challenge his mind. One of them is about the challenges we deal with when designing and managing permissioned networks, and the other one focuses on user identity in the permissioned context. Definitely worth the read, and it’s always a pleasure to have Jesus in my newsletter!
https://hackernoon.com/identity-the-elephant-in-the-enterprise-blockchain-room-6f31ed8d4132