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Blockchain technology has been part of the business technology conversation for some time now. Whether you’re relatively new to blockchain, quite familiar with it or actively working to bring a blockchain idea to life, bookmark this for answers to many of your questions, plus links to a wealth of resources.
Blockchain is the distributed ledger technology unlocking transformative new value for businesses and industries around the world. While the technology itself presents many questions, the most important one isn’t technical at all: what is the business problem you’re looking to solve?
Maybe you’re part of a supply chain with limited visibility between participants. Or your business ecosystem is bogged down in time-consuming legacy processes. Or you’re looking to create a new business model with ecosystem partners that transforms your industry.
Top blockchain use cases today
Blockchain can help solve business problems thanks to its distributed ledger technology, data immutability and smart contracts that certify certain business conditions have been met.
With deployments across industries and around the world, Hyperledger Fabric has become the de-facto standard for leading enterprise blockchain platforms.
As an open source project of the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Fabric has brought together a vast array of organizations and developers contributing to its innovation and stability.
Hyperledger Fabric has matured to the version 2.0 milestone, and it’s the most widely-used blockchain protocol for business workloads.
Its permissioned and modular architecture, flexible endorsement model, pluggable consensus algorithms, open smart contract model, data privacy, low latency, support of multiple programming languages and more make it an ideal base for building a wide variety of solutions.
It also encourages the kind of collaboration that businesses, industries – and the world – will need to meet the challenges we all face.
“20th century business models that encourage working in seclusion and an atmosphere of competitive winner-takes-all attitudes do not fit with the enormous 21st century challenges we face. Instead, we need to rethink, reinvigorate and re-innovate human collaboration for the new century.”
— Jay Baek, Vice President, INBLOCK
“20th century business models that encourage working in seclusion and an atmosphere of competitive winner-takes-all attitudes do not fit with the enormous 21st century challenges we face. Instead, we need to rethink, reinvigorate and re-innovate human collaboration for the new century.”
— Jay Baek, Vice President, INBLOCK
Commercialized blockchain platforms like the IBM Blockchain Platform add business production requirements on top of the open-source Hyperledger Fabric framework, giving you the ability to run business blockchain solutions with efficiency and confidence.
You will want your blockchain network to evolve over time. That’s why the IBM Blockchain Platform has been engineered to help you build, operate, govern and grow your solution over its entire lifecycle.
Build
VS Code Extension, smart contract samples, local testing environment and more help developers quickly learn how to build blockchain networks.
Operate
Award-winning design and APIs to get the most from key enterprise-grade features, including monitoring, high performance, high availability and added security.
Govern
Frameworks for deploying business logic and instantiating smart contracts; define member organizations endorsing transactions and policies they must follow.
Grow
No upfront investment, and pay only for what you use. Upgrade easily through Kubernetes; retain ownership of everything you create – no vendor lock-in.
The IBM Blockchain Platform also allows you to deploy and maintain ledgers (Peers) in different computing environments. This multicloud capability means you can truly unleash the power of blockchain across your business ecosystem, bringing together different organizations regardless of infrastructure.
Case study: Ignite success in any cloud (629 KB)
The IBM Blockchain Platform comes with 24x7x365 support, even for issues that might arise in the open source code. And it makes it easy to manage version upgrades of Hyperledger Fabric without interruption to your network.
As the name implies, a permissioned blockchain network requires that members have permission to join, to get a copy of the ledger, and to transact with others.
Permissioned blockchain = accountability
This means those transacting on the blockchain are known (and not anonymous). So there is accountability for their actions taken on the blockchain – just as you’d want in any other business transaction.
Permissioned networks are also known for their ability to protect the privacy of transactions. In Hyperledger Fabric, transactions can be set up using channels, allowing for one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many private blockchain interactions.
Blockchain use cases that don’t require permission often rely on time-consuming proof-of-work or proof-of-stake consensus algorithms. In contrast, permissioned blockchains use more efficient consensus algorithms. This means they can scale and have higher performance with more transactions per second.
Read: Does Hyperledger Fabric perform at scale?
Finally, permissioned blockchains designed for business have more security controls built in, with fully-encrypted blocks and fault tolerance that keep data secure even in the presence of bad or careless actors.
Data on a permissioned blockchain can be kept private or be made open for public or third-party viewing. It’s up to the members of the consortium governing the blockchain network and individual members to decide which data is kept private and which data – if any – is shared.
Most business blockchains choose to keep their blockchain data private. Yet there are some applications and use cases that may benefit by sharing data and making it visible more publicly. A blockchain platform using Hyperledger Fabric as its framework – like the IBM Blockchain Platform – gives you the flexibility to choose.
Read The Founder’s Handbook, your guide to helping your business ecosystem get started with blockchain:
- Identify the business problem
- Build your ecosystem
- Design your business model
- Address blockchain governance
Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology provides revolutionary value by helping different organizations come together rapidly around a shared, immutable version of the truth.
But what happens when those different organizations have different IT infrastructures – with massive investments behind them? A blockchain platform like the IBM Blockchain Platform supports deployment across multiple IT architectures, so the growth of your business ecosystem won’t be slowed by technology that’s not aligned to your IT realities.
Watch: What every technical leader needs to know about blockchain for 2020
The IBM Blockchain Platform has been optimized for Red Hat® OpenShift® and leverages the popular Kubernetes container architecture so you can develop and rapidly deploy blockchain solutions wherever you and your ecosystem partners choose.
Read: A deeper dive into blockchain interoperability with IBM’s Chris Ferris
The IBM Blockchain Platform is a scalable, highly reliable platform for your enterprise to deploy applications, unlocking new value through shared, secure data with ecosystem participants.
Some may think that since blockchain is designed to maintain multiple shared copies of the ledger – eliminating worries over a single point of failure – that there isn’t a need to plan for availability and resiliency.
It’s true that the platform’s component deployment strategies and built-in Kubernetes features make your blockchain network more highly available and protect it from downtime. But it’s still important to consider the time it takes to rebuild or recover from an outage in light of your specific use case.
In addition, blockchain’s data permanence and dependence on data sharing between enterprises also requires a deeper examination of the ramifiactions of data privacy actions like GDPR and others.
The following resources can help you further explore performance, availability, security and data privacy aspects of the IBM Blockchain Platform and Hyperledger Fabric.
Performance:
Hyperledger blockchain performance metrics
More questions answered on Hyperledger Fabric performance and scale
Availability and Security:
IBM Blockchain Platform high availability docs
Securing your IBM Blockchain Platform service instance and more
Planning and configuring the IBM Blockchain Platform on IBM Cloud
Data Privacy:
Blockchain is a team sport, bringing different enterprises together in new ways – and different stakeholders within those enterprises as well.
Through hundreds of client engagements to date, we’ve found that business leaders can identify blockchain use cases once they understand the technology. This extends to the C-suite, where enterprise leaders are interested in how blockchain can enable new business models. Sharing resources like the ones below can help advance the blockchain for business conversation in your enterprise.
Resources to share with your colleagues:
At IBM Blockchain, we’ll meet you wherever you are in your blockchain journey. Explore the different ways in which you can get started today.
