Abstract
In this digital era, at most 80-90% of business transactions are digitized using different mechanisms. In the case of businesses and financial institutions, such digitization poses both merits as well as challenges. Nowadays, the IT industries are focusing on providing a trustworthy solution, namely blockchain-based applications, to provide secured online transactions. This blockchain technology provides a comprehensive solution to B2B applications by providing support to process information across organizations in a highly secured manner. In blockchain, these kinds of secured online transactions are achieved using hyperledgers. In particular, the hyperledger is decentralized as it is replicated across the entire network for all the participants to collaborate in a secured manner. In this chapter, an analysis of the application of hyperledgers in B2B blockchain apps to and their implications in this digital era is provided.
TopBackground On Blockchain And Its Frameworks
Blockchain technology provides a decentralized, distributed ledger system that can provide a complete record of transactions between multiple parties in a B2B or B2C environment. Even though the Blockchain technology was started up as a means for Bitcoin based transactions, due to its security aspects, it is now expanded its operations in other mitigation technologies. This reduces the human errors involved in data storage when secured storage of data becomes essential.
The Blockchain technology can be applied in any industry or business as it handles everything as digital assets and transactions. As it applies encryption based mechanism, it provides secured online transactions and the integrity preservation in transactions.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Smart Contracts: They allow the participants of a business transaction to do their transactions without any intermediary or any centralized trusted authority.
Ethereum: It is a technology that focuses on digital money transactions including global fund transactions, payments via internet.
Proof of Work: It is a technique applied to verify the transactions’ accuracy when the transactions are made using cryptocurrencies. As there is no centralized control authority in cryptocurrency-based transactions, they use Proof of Work (POW) to ensure the transaction integrity.
Chain Code: The hyperledger platform allows some code to be executed to create transactions between two business entities when some specific conditions are met. This code is called as chain code which helps to create dynamic transactions on the go. Some of the programming languages used to write chain code are Google’s Go and advanced Java Script language.
Blockchain: Blockchain is a distributed data structure that can be considered as a decentralized ledger that contains all the transactions performed over a communication network. Each transaction is recoded as encrypted data and is stored in blocks based on time of transaction.
B2B Transactions: These transactions refer to business transactions between two business entities. It includes subscriptions, product purchases, contract agreements, investments etc. They typically mean wholesale transactions.
Hyperledger Fabric: It is developed by IBM with Linux as a flexible Blockchain framework which acts as a standard for enterprise Blockchain platforms. It has a wide range of customer base.
B2C Transactions: B2C transactions are related to the relationship between Business and Customers. These transactions typically mean the individual customers’ purchases of products from an organization.
Ethereum Platform: It is one of the Blockchain platform that establishes a decentralized, peer to peer network which executes smart contracts between the business transactions.
RW Sets: In Hyperledger Fabric, the process starts with the client application sending transaction proposals: Each client application proposes transactions to endorse peers for the simulation and endorsement process. Each endorsing peer simulates the proposed transaction and stores sets of read and written data named RW sets. These sets are signed by endorsing peers and are returned to the client application.