SIAChain, a DLT platform that facilitates Communities to adopt DLT/Blockchain
25/06/18
The authors: Roberto Lorini, Marco Monaco, Lorenzo Paruscio
The growth of permissioned DLT/Blockchain technologies
In the last 4 years, many industries have seen in Blockchain the promising technological paradigm to digitalize the interaction and the agreement processes between peers without relying on a third party as it happens for centralized platforms of Web 1.0 and 2.0.
Figure 1 - Industries and Use Cases
Source: sia.eu
As time goes on, besides the affirmation of cryptocurrencies, new permissioned DLT/blockchain technologies have been growing. They have been inspired by the Bitcoin’s shared ledger architecture, based on peer-to-peer networking, PKI cryptography, transaction rules and consensus mechanisms, to create distributed computational standards that worked as an operating system layer for different and interoperable distributed applications (dApp).
"The Big Three"
The majority of Blockchain initiatives in the market are converging on three main technologies, “The Big Three” (Corda, Fabric and Ethereum), that solve with different approaches and trade-offs the additional needs of the industries, as scalability, confidentiality and interoperability of assets.
Corda is an open source DLT platform that has been developed from scratch starting on requirements coming from the Financial Industries, thus can theoretically achieve great level of scalability and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric is an open source Blockchain platform that offers high level of flexibility and can provide a good balance between data access control and scalability, it could be more suitable for use cases where all participants need to share the same view of a general ledger.
Ethereum Enterprise is the underlying open source technology of the homonymous ecosystem that can be used in permissioned context and comes with built-in compatibility of thousands of open source projects/use cases that today are available on the public Ethereum Blockchain. At this stage of development, the tradeoff between privacy and complexity it's not at the level of Corda and the scalability it's not at the level of Fabric, but it's more mature and flexible as its Public network is in production since July 2015.
Figure 2 - "The Big Three"
Governance complexity is a barrier to adoption for Communities
Regardless of which platform suits better for a business model, no one can benefit from Blockchain technology alone. dApps creates value for groups of stakeholders of the same industry (namely Communities) as they could break down cost and time of agreements between parties and they can be applied to several type of business processes.
The experience gained on the market by PwC in last 4 years has shown an enormous organizational complexity for participants to coordinate themselves during the definition of the Community governance: upgrade procedures, onboarding/offboarding process, commercial and technological decisions, legal and privacy framework, interaction with technology Providers and dApp Designers. This lack of governance can be a side effect of a DLT and can affect time to market, increasing costs and, sometimes, can prevent decision makers of industries to join projects or scale up from a PoC stage.
Additionally, all DLT platforms and Dapps continue evolving, deploying frequently new versions and upgrades that must be implemented homogeneously into all peers’ environments to avoid security issues and ledger inconsistencies.
SIAChain, the first DLT infrastructure in Europe
SIA leveraging SIAnet, a private network that connects more than 600 nodes geographically distributed in Europe, designed and deployed SIAChain: the first DLT infrastructure in Europe that is based on the concept of Supernodes and facilitate the growth of Business Communities built around dApps.
Supernodes are hardware appliance deployed on SIA customers’ premise (or, at request, hosted on SIA Private Cloud) that runs different DLT Clients in parallel, with multiple dApps, allowing each customer to join or create Business Networks, each one solving a particular use case.
SIAChain comes with a defined governance framework that allows participants to focus only on the business problem that they need to solve, developing the dApp and creating the Business Network with their peers. Everything is well described in order to facilitate the entire process.
SIA main value is the ability to verify that all Supernodes run the same version of software for both DLT clients and subscribed dApps. Moreover, SIA certifies every single dApp provided by Communities and deployed on the platform to minimize security and interoperability issues and operates auxiliary services needed by some DLT (Notaries, Orderers, Oracles, etc.).
Figure 3 - Overview SIAChain
Leveraging the PwC Blockchain Competence Center
PwC advised SIA during the project lifetime, from the concept to the deployment of the pilot version of the SIAChain, including the initial training period, sharing its best practices and its recommendations and suggestions. PwC Blockchain Competence Center, leveraging the experience on major DLT/Blockchain solutions on the market, benchmarked different technologies and described best practices facilitating SIA in its design of the platform. The pilot phase of the SIAChain includes only R3 Corda DLT that has been prioritized by SIA over Fabric and Ethereum, but parallel streams are already working on the new version that will include also these solutions.
PwC Blockchain Competence Center in Italy is a PwC Advisory unit fully dedicated on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. It collects professionals from different LoS that range from legal and tax experts to functional analysts, enterprise architects and developers (Corda certified), and subject matter experts in order to support clients with all necessary capabilities.
PwC is part of Hyperledger consortium.
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