Chinese telecommunications, telecom equipment, and services giant Huawei has recently publicly launched its blockchain platform. Their blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform is built on Hyperledger.
Readers are aware how cloud computing has brought in several as-a-service models that have fundamentally changed how companies and developers go about developing, testing, deploying, and running their apps. There are also blockchain start-ups that have launched BaaS platforms that give developers similar facilities for blockchain apps, for e.g. Stratis.
Hyperledger, the famous open-source blockchain operations platform created by Linux foundation in 2015, is the basis on which Huawei‘s BaaS, called “Blockchain Service” is built. Hyperledger has grown significantly since their launch, with over 100 major business sponsors, many partnerships, and many integrations.
Huawei is highly experienced in distributed computing, platform-as-s-service (PaaS), data management, and encryption, and the company has significantly leveraged their expertise in these areas for this project. The company has described the features of their Blockchain Service platform as following:
- Built on Hyperledger Fabric 1.0;
- High-performance, high-availability platform;
- Facilitates development of smart contracts;
- Suitable for both enterprises and developers;
- Enables creation of blockchain apps quickly;
- Enables easy deployment of blockchain apps quickly on Huawei cloud, deployment time is reduced to minutes;
- Flexible, for e.g. provides features like pluggable consensus algorithm;
- Secure and private platform, which matters a lot for enterprises, with their high volume of proprietary data.
The company envisages use of their platform in many industries, for e.g.:
- supply chain finance;
- supply chain traceability;
- securities trading;
- food safety;
- crowdfunding;
- digital asset management;
- records management.
There are other tech giants that have launched BaaS platforms, for e.g.:
- IBM Blockchain, built on Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, was launched in March 2017;
- Microsoft had launched its “Ethereum Blockchain as a service (EBaas)” that ran on Microsoft Azure cloud.
Huawei, headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, is already very experienced with blockchain, for e.g.:
- They have partnered with Hyperledger for the Caliper project, which was recently released. This software is for testing performance of blockchains.
- They have also filed a patent for using blockchain to protect intellectual property (IP) rights.
