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Blockchain & b2b Transactions

 By looking at the above facts , you would have realized how "Blockchain" is emerging as a next big wave and how important it is to recognize the fact that going forward , everything in this world is going to revolve around this new Avatar. we cannot think it as just one other technology trend. It is considered as "new" Internet ! . It is perceived as the architectural paradigm that is going to change the way transactions are happening between multiple parties so far.
In case of existing B2B transaction / multi-party business process architecture, there is no single source of truth ; There are disparate sources of various information about business process transactions.
 Also , parties participating in a particular transaction need to wait for long time , depending upon the response of the dependent systems as b2b transactions are carried out usually by long running batch processes . They are totally based on "Disconnected" architectures with a broker (Message broker aka "Hub") orchestrating transactions between the disparately deployed systems. Because of this, a particular business party cannot trigger internal actions unless there is a confirmation of transaction.
 In the legacy system , there is a probability where each of the partner's system maintain separate transaction ledgers with discrepancies & duplication , resulting in confusions & disagreements.This will trigger a huge time consuming process related to reconciliations , especially during the time of auditing and regulatory compliance related activities.
With the combination of Blockchain and 'off-chain' capabilities , these short comings can be eliminated. Blockchain will enable exchange of the transaction messages between the parties in near real time and secured storage of the transaction records.
 Off-Chain capabilities usually refer to the activities that will be performed outside of Blockchain platform such as Analytics , AI, Bot etc.
 With the combination of Blockchain and Cloud platform based off-chain capabilities , the typical requirements of a business process management system can be addressed and also the velocity of entire business-to-business transactions can be accelerated.
 The following factors make us to consider leveraging Blockchain platform for b2b transactions :
  • Transactions are immutable -so there is no room for altering any old transactions ; This will make any future auditing processes for financial authenticity , regulatory / compliance easier
  • Transactions are Cryptographically secured
All the Cloud platform providers started providing services for building Blockchain solution.
For example, Microsoft Azure cloud platform provides various Blockchain solution building capabilities :
Also, to make the development of Blockchain solution comparatively easier , there are various open source projects available for leverage.
For example, Nethereum , a .Net integration library for Ethereum allows developers to interact with Ethereum clients like geth, eth or parity using RPC.
When it is acclaimed that a combination of Blockchain and Cloud based off-chain capabilities are here to accelerate b2b transactions , there are also guidance available on how to leverage Blockchain in appropriate manner and not to overdo with it. 
For example , Blockchain is good for value transfer . But when it comes rich application data flow , it will be slow as it would require thousands of transactions ; also immutability will be a weakness for data storage .Only when you think that a data that is need to stored should be immutable for auditing purposes in the later stages , it should go to Blockchain. Otherwise , you should leverage other reliable , scalable distributed storage systems like CosmosDB
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