Blockchain technology is a revolutionary advancement in the digital age that provides secure and transparent ways of conducting transactions, storing data, and verifying identities without the need for intermediaries. The blockchain is a decentralized ledger that records transactions in a tamper-proof and verifiable manner.
As the technology matures, its potential uses have expanded to include industries such as finance, healthcare, supply chain management, and more. For businesses, blockchain technology can offer increased security, efficiency, and transparency in their operations. In this article, we will explore the top 7 blockchain platforms that businesses can consider to leverage the benefits of this transformative technology.
Enterprise Ethereum
Ethereum is a blockchain platform that is highly active in its development, providing businesses with easy-to-use tools and reliable technology. It offers privacy and permissioning features that make it appealing to leading businesses worldwide.
Enterprise Ethereum is a set of guidelines and technical specifications designed to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology among enterprises. These guidelines provide businesses with the ability to use Ethereum-based private chains and the public mainnet. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), made up of blockchain and incumbent businesses from around the world, maintains the specifications.
Applications built on the Ethereum Mainnet can interoperate, much like applications built on the Internet. Furthermore, businesses and consortia can create private, permissioned blockchains for specific applications based on Ethereum technology.
Using blockchain applications, businesses can increase trust and reduce coordination costs between parties, improve network accountability and operational efficiency, and create new business models and value opportunities. This helps them stay competitive and future-proof their organizations.
Several businesses are already using Ethereum for their operations. For example,
Provenance, a UK-based startup, is using Ethereum to track the supply chain of fish from boat to plate. By using Ethereum, the company is able to ensure that the fish are caught sustainably and that they are handled properly during transport.
Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform that provides unique capabilities over other popular blockchain platforms. It was established under the Linux Foundation, known for nurturing successful open source projects. Fabric has a modular and flexible architecture that can be customized for different industry use cases, such as healthcare, supply chain, and finance. It also supports smart contracts authored in general-purpose programming languages like Java and Go, making it easier for enterprises to develop contracts without the need for additional training. The Fabric platform is permissioned, meaning that participants are known to each other, which allows for a governance model built on trust, such as a legal agreement or framework for handling disputes.
Hyperledger Fabric offers pluggable consensus protocols that allow customization to fit specific use cases and trust models. The platform can use a crash fault-tolerant (CFT) consensus protocol for single-enterprise or trusted authority use cases, while a more traditional byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol may be necessary for multi-party decentralized use cases. Fabric can also operate without a native cryptocurrency, reducing risk/attack vectors and deployment costs. These design features contribute to Fabric’s high transaction processing and confirmation latency performance, as well as the privacy and confidentiality of transactions and smart contracts.
Hyperledger Sawtooth
Sawtooth is an enterprise-focused framework for distributed ledger technology. It was created with an emphasis on security, scalability, and modularity. Sawtooth’s architecture consists of five main components that include a peer-to-peer network for messaging and transaction processing between nodes, a distributed log that maintains an ordered list of transactions, a state machine/smart contract logic layer that processes transaction content, a distributed state storage that stores the resulting state after transaction processing, and a consensus algorithm that ensures agreement across the network on transaction order and resulting state.
Sawtooth is built with a flexible consensus interface and a modular transaction processing platform that can adapt to various deployment scenarios, threat models, and smart contract languages. It follows a conventional blockchain architecture, featuring a gossip network as its underlying layer and a chain of transaction blocks that are cryptographically linked.
Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth are both distributed ledger platforms but they have distinct architectures and features to cater to different use cases in the world of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Some of the key differences between the two are in terms of permission level, transaction processing, transaction speed, consensus algorithms, smart contract technology, supported smart contract programming languages, smart contact types and EVM support.
IBM Blockchain
IBM Blockchain is a private and decentralized blockchain network that has been successful with enterprise clients. It is ideal for linking into enterprise cloud and legacy technologies seamlessly. IBM Blockchain developer tool is flexible, functional, and customizable. Additionally, a user-friendly interface is provided to simplify critical tasks like smart contract deployment and testing. IBM offers a managed and full-stack blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) with the IBM Blockchain Platform. Clients can choose to deploy their blockchain components in their preferred environment from development through production. There are different offerings available, such as the IBM Blockchain Platform 2.5.4 and the IBM Blockchain Platform for IBM Cloud.
With the IBM Blockchain Platform, creating and managing a blockchain network is a breeze. The platform offers a user-friendly interface that allows you to easily manage networks, channels, and smart contracts. As the network grows, developers can effortlessly invite new members, create custom governance policies, manage the identity credentials of participants, and more. The IBM Blockchain Platform offers a new type of decentralized business network that prioritizes trust, finality, and privacy.
The IBM Blockchain Platform is a comprehensive solution built on Hyperledger Fabric that offers various features to expand and enhance Fabric’s value. It provides a high-performance and secure environment suitable for a broad range of use cases in regulated industries. Some of its features include support for Fabric Gateway, operational and development dashboards, a Visual Studio Code extension, multi-language smart contract support, seamless addition of new network members, secure channel creation, sample code for multiple industries, and zero-downtime updates. The platform also offers multi-cloud deployment models, a blockchain marketplace, and round-the-clock support.
Consensys Quorum
Quorum is a private and permissioned blockchain platform that uses the official Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol. It utilizes a ‘raft-based’ consensus algorithm to achieve faster blocktimes, transaction finality, and on-demand block creation. Quorum aims to reuse existing technology to minimize changes to go-ethereum and reduce the effort required to sync with future versions of the public Ethereum codebase. The privacy functionality of Quorum is implemented in a separate layer that sits on top of the standard Ethereum protocol layer.
The Quorum blockchain solution uses cryptography to prevent unauthorized parties from accessing sensitive data, and it involves a shared blockchain and smart contract software architecture with modifications to Ethereum. The smart contract architecture allows for the separation of private data, while modifications to the go-ethereum codebase affect the block proposal and validation processes. With the modified validation process, nodes validate all public transactions and any private transactions they are involved in by executing the contract code linked to them, while skipping the code execution process for other private transactions.
Quorum was developed by JP Morgan and it focuses on addressing the shortcomings of first-generation blockchains in the finance industry. It is designed to meet enterprise needs and offers several features that distinguish it from other blockchain platforms. Quorum is faster than Ethereum and Bitcoin, with a simple consensus mechanism that enables it to execute over 150 transactions per second. It is also cost-efficient, as it eliminates the gas costs associated with transactions. Quorum provides permission management, reducing the possibility of catastrophic breaches or failure. Additionally, Quorum offers privacy support for both private and on-chain transactions, with private transactions being verified without revealing details.
R3 Corda
R3 Corda is a distributed ledger software that facilitates recording and processing of shared data, including contracts. It has the ability to support smart contracts, defined as agreements that are both enforceable by legal means and executable by computer code in conjunction with human input and control. R3 Corda is focused on financial services and it was launched in 2016 by a consortium of over 200 banks, financial institutions, and technology companies.
Corda offers three primary tools to achieve global distributed consensus. The first is smart contract logic, which specifies constraints to ensure that state transitions follow pre-agreed rules outlined in the contract code as part of Cor-dApps. The second tool is notary pools, which provide uniqueness and timestamping services to order transactions temporally and prevent conflicts. The third tool is the flow framework, a unique component that simplifies the process of writing complex multi-step protocols between multiple mutually distrusting parties across the internet.
Corda offers several key features that enable secure and efficient transactions across its network. One such feature is the ability to maintain a single identity across all Corda-based networks, reducing security risks by tying all Cor-dApps identities to a legal entity. Additionally, Corda supports the free movement of digital assets and currencies across network boundaries using trusted exchange protocols that meet regulatory demands for privacy and security. R3 is also working on building interoperability to ensure Corda can act as a bridge to liquidity beyond its ecosystem, allowing for the secure transfer of non-traditional digital assets into and out of regulated Corda-based networks. This unlocks the potential for a “Regulated Web3” where new types of assets can be securely traded across networks.
The Baseline Protocol
The Baseline Protocol is a standard that allows enterprises to synchronize business processes across multiple parties while maintaining privacy and security. It is an emerging standard that can be applied to different systems of record, including various blockchains or distributed ledger technologies, enabling organizations to reduce costs and enhance operational efficiency. With Baseline, enterprises can automate complex, multiparty processes without the need to move data from their systems of record. This ensures data privacy and integrity, while improving the overall security of the process.
For example, enterprise systems such as ERP and CRM are expensive and the lack of synchronization between these systems across organizations can result in disputes, lost inventory, inflated capital costs, and regulatory actions, causing significant disruption and value leakage. The Baseline Protocol solves these problems by providing a common frame of reference that is always on, tamper-resistant, and prevents any individual or group from taking over the system. The protocol aims to overcome the issues of privacy, security, and performance that have been problematic for past blockchain technology, especially in meeting the highest standards required by corporate IT departments.
The Baseline Protocol allows secure collaboration between enterprises without revealing sensitive information on the blockchain. It enables zero-knowledge execution of workflow business logic and supports tokenization and DeFi without impacting end-users. The protocol enables trust among organizations that may not have a reason to trust each other by using a public blockchain to store relevant proofs while keeping sensitive data off-chain. The Baseledger network’s consensus mechanism is based on Tendermint consensus. This consensus mechanism guarantees that each operator running a Baseledger full or leaf node stays in sync with the entire ecosystem.
Conclusion
In conclusion, blockchain technology offers an unparalleled opportunity for businesses to optimize their operations and improve their bottom line. With so many blockchain platforms available today, it’s important for businesses to carefully consider their needs and choose the platform that best aligns with their goals. From the enterprise-grade permissioned Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth to the privacy-focused Quorum and Corda, and the versatile Baseledger, there’s a blockchain platform out there for every business. By leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology, businesses can increase efficiency, security, and transparency, paving the way for a more prosperous future.
