Enterprise blockchain platforms part 1

by Lumai Mubanga

Enterprise blockchain is essentially the type of blockchain intended to empower a private network with some central authority controls that is able to take part in consensus and validate transactions on the network. The rise of enterprise blockchain has been supported different types of enterprise blockchain platforms.

Enterprise blockchain platforms exist precisely to enable businesses to implement their own blockchain use case ideas without starting from scratch.  In this article, we’ll be taking a look at some enterprise blockchain platforms.

A number of companies have started to develop on top of already existing platforms rather than building their own blockchains from scratch. You may recall that many Forks have developed from existing platforms. We consider three of these platforms.

• Ethereum Enterprise Alliance

Created specifically to meet the needs of enterprise projects, this is a consortium of major world players like JP Morgan and Microsoft among others. They aim to produce blockchain standards different from private blockchain. These standards are designed to meet businesses with less need for decentralization. Businesses of all kinds are supported, thanks to Ethereum’s smart contracts written in Solidity, which is a Turing-complete language. This theoretically means that writing any program using it will make the program run. Therefore, you can theoretically run any program on the Ethereum network.

This key innovation set the stage for many other platforms to surface. For example, consenSys is a startup founded by one of the Ethereum cofounders meant to develop and foster growth in the Ethereum ecosystem, helping popular initiatives such as MetaMask and Truffle.

• Hyper Ledger Project

The hyperledger project platform was created under the Linux umbrella. Created with the need for easily accessible permissioned or private blockchain platforms, it focuses on a wide breadth of industries, including finance, healthcare, and supply chain, some of the most popular use cases to date. Its main thrust has been to allow businesses to create their own custom blockchains from scratch as opposed to creating forks. Some popular versions under this are Hyperledger Fabric and Hyper ledger Sawtooth. Fabric allows smart contracts to be written on top of the platform while the Hyperledger Sawtooth uses proof of Elapsed Time as the consensus algorithm.

In order to allow businesses to develop blockchain networks with permissionless properties, the Nakamoto consensus mechanism was adopted. The fabric, on the other hand, was designed to handle permissioned blockchain. However, this led to a loss of privacy as opposed to strengthened decentralization and security. This tradeoff is not uncommon in many blockchain implementation designs. It is also noteworthy to state that many companies under the Ethereum Enterprise alliance threw their support toward hyperledger.

• Corda

Corda is another open-source platform for blockchain development enabling next-generation transparency according to its website. Its focus is to enable banks to record, manage, synchronize, and support financial transactions and agreements through distributed ledger technology. The phrase “distributed ledger technology” refers to decentralized record management although the technology does not yet use blockchains.

The Enterprise blockchain is indeed growing. Part two will consider some more.