10.4 Exploring Leading Enterprise Blockchain Platforms - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

In this lesson, I am gonna focus on the leading enterprise Blockchain platforms. There are many different types of enterprise Blockchain platforms, but the ones I'm gonna specify for you now, are the most popular ones, and the ones that you should take a look at, if you're actually thinking about developing your own solution. So for that, I have prepared a table for you. And in that table, I have specified the Blockchain Platforms, and also I have shown whether they offer smart contract functionality, if it has a cryptocurrency of its own, also, which focus areas is that platform used in, and also which type of governance the blockchain has? And that's important, because when you're dealing in an enterprise environment, you need to have some sort of governance to determine who owns the platform. So if there are any changes into the protocol, if there's gonna be changes in how the functionality works, well you need to understand who controls the governance for that platform. And I've specified that as well. Now, key things I want to point out in here is if you notice not all the blockchain platforms that I'm presenting has smart contract functionality, as a matter of fact, Ripple does not have smart contract functionality. Additionally, not all of them have a cryptocurrency of their own. And that's because in many of these cases, you really don't need a minor. So for example, Ethereum does need mining, and as a result, you need to have Ether, we just have the miners get compensated for mining Ethereum blocks. Now, on the other hand, you do not need to do that for a Hyperledger Fabric or Quorum or R3 Corda and not even for Ripple. What you're doing with all of these is a very different environment. But I wanna point out that in the case of Ethereum, you have a cryptocurrency called Ether. Additionally, I've also pointed out the focus areas that each of these platforms focuses on. You'll see that three of them are general. That means that they're used across all sorts of industries. But two of them are actually very specifically focused on the financial industry. And these are developed specifically for the financial industry and address some of the key challenges, which are, for example, the scalability issue, the transactions per second, these are actually addressed with R3 Corda and Ripple. I've also specified which is the governance for these, which is, which is the governing entity that actually has governance on how the process of the protocol being developed into the future? So for instance, Ethereum needs to go through upgrades, and in the process of upgrading, certain functionalities will be changed. Same thing applies to Hyperledger Fabric, same thing applies to Quorum. So the question is, who controls the governance? And the direction for this blockchain platform are specified in that section called governance. I will now give you some more information about each of the different elements I have specified for you. In the case of Ethereum, Ethereum has a largest number of use cases. It is the most popular, smart contract platform out there, and most enterprise applications are actually built using Ethereum. As a result, there's a large user base and a lot of different use cases of Ethereum products. Now there's a pre-existing infrastructure that can run smart contracts and Decentralized Applications. In other words, there's an Ethereum network globally already ready to run your applications. All you have to do is pay for the smart contracts using Ether. So you can build a Decentralized Application that run on Ethereum, and then you just have to pay to run those contracts using Ether. Now, because of this, there's no need to invest in creating your own network of nodes, think about it. If you are already dealing with an Ethereum network, you have a massive number of mining nodes, all over the world that are running what's known as the Ethereum virtual machine, that is, they will run your smart contracts on this network that already exists. You do not have to build your own network, it's already running out there. There's some key challenges to using Ethereum. For starters, there's a privacy issue. Ethereum is a public blockchain, and in some situations you may not have your information being available and viewable on a public blockchain. It is also a permissionless ledger. This presents some challenges when you're trying to control the information of who gets to access to it, having a permissionless ledger does present some challenges. Key things I wanna point out also is latency issues. Consensus in Ethereum is achieved via proof of work and we spoke about that. Now, while in Bitcoin, a block takes approximately 10 minutes, in Ethereum, it's faster, it's every 17 seconds. But still that is an issue because this latency of having to wait 17 seconds for every new block does present the challenge, because it doesn't move as quickly, and so you have to wait till every single block gets created in order to change the state of the blockchain. We will now talk about Hyperledger. Hyperledger is part of Hyperledger. An open source community of blockchain projects. This is created and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric is only one of several Hyperledger frameworks, and it was initially contributed by Digital Assets and IBM. IBM is a big big proponent and very very actively involved in development of Hyperledger, and they proactively use Hyperledger in most of their implementations. This is very suitable for enterprise projects. It has the most complete privacy features, it has a permissioned ledger, and it enables plug and play consensus and membership services. These are specific functionalities that are accustomed designed to address enterprise situation. We will now talk about Quorum. Quorum was developed by JP Morgan Chase, and it is an enterprise focused version of Ethereum. So what you have in Ethereum, basically JP Morgan Chase took the code base and developed an enterprise focused version. And this specific blockchain Quorum, is designed for high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants. In other words, what JP Morgan Chase did, is they took Ethereum, which is a public blockchain, and has some latency issues 'cause you have to wait 17 seconds for blocks, you have to do all this proof of work, all of this and they resolve them, and create a Quorum to deliver high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions, and enabled a permission group of known participants. As a result, Quorum can process hundreds of transactions per second, and it does not use proof of work consensus. The transaction validation and block creation process are distributed throughout the network. We will now talk about R3 Corda. R3 Corda is a consortium composed of financial institutions. That is, these are multiple financial institutions that have come together to be part of this R3 Corda consortium. It's an open source project developed by R3, and there are more than technology and industry partners, which compose this consortium. It is a financial focus, but it is also being used in other industries and areas. So their primary focus has been financial, but it's been expanding beyond that. It uses a permissioned ledger, and it's known for being easy to integrate with legacy systems, which leads us to Ripple. Ripple is another enterprise blockchain platform, which was originally founded in 2012 as OpenCoin. Now it was renamed to Ripple in 2015, and it has a global network of over 200 customers. Now the goal behind Ripple is that it connect banks, payment providers and digital asset exchanges via global payments network called RippleNet. The goal is to enable more efficient cross-border payments in a faster way. In their process, transaction time for cross-border payments is reduced from days to a matter of seconds, with instant settlements. We spoke about the case study of how Santander is working with Ripple, while you see here, how the vision behind Ripple is to bring down the transaction time for cross-border payments, from a matter of days to a matter of seconds, and they're achieving that with instant settlements. The goal is to offer one frictionless experience to send money globally. I'd like to point out that I've spoken to you about the leading enterprise blockchain solutions, but those are not the only ones, and as a matter of fact, there are others. Bitcoin can be used if used properly within an enterprise blockchain environment and their solutions to build enterprise blockchain solutions on top of the Bitcoin. On top of that also, there's Multichain, there's Openchain. So what I want to point out to you is that, there are many different types of blockchains which you could use, but the ones that I've specified for you are the leading enterprise blockchain platforms.