Foreword
The hype around blockchain (thankfully!) peaked in early 2018, largely driven by financial speculation around Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto-currencies. Despite inauspicious beginnings, and the “Isn’t this just a database?” technical naysayers, blockchain technology is a new and powerful set of tools for solving reliable and automated intercompany code and data sharing, using cryptography to enforce access control, privacy, and encryption.
Historically, building a consortium with many member corporations, and putting in place automated sharing of data, has been reserved to a very small number of use cases, and to companies with very deep pockets—typically in banking, for example, the Visa or Swift payment networks.
Open source enterprise blockchain technology, notably Hyperledger Fabric, and managed Blockchain as a Service platforms, from IBM and others, empower business leaders and technologists to cost-effectively build consortia for many more use cases and industries, across a broad set of economic (business) networks.
Enterprises have spent the past 10+ years digitizing their internal IT processes to the point that the time is now ripe to look at the lack of digitization and inefficiencies between enterprises within a business network. Today, most enterprises exchange data with their business partners via an unholy mix of emails, documents, fax, phone calls, CSV- and Excel-format flat files, database dumps, EDI, and web service calls. We can do so much better!
At Clause, via the Open Source Accord Project, we focus on ensuring that the legal contracts that govern business exchanges can also be digitized, and that logic automated using a blockchain smart contract represents the intent of the parties to a governing legal contract.
Blockchain forces business and technical leaders to confront fundamental (and difficult!) issues around standardization of data formats, trust, privacy, governance, and legal/regulatory oversight. The transformation to blockchain-mediated business networks will not happen overnight, but will play out slowly, but surely, over the next decade or more.