The potentials of blockchain are quite enormous and all industries that deal with transactions, of any kind, can be truly disrupted by the technology. The reason for this is not far-fetched: blockchain offers relatively compelling advantages over other existing technologies in terms of security, transparency, and trust. As a result, more people are embracing the technology and more blockchain platforms spring up everyday offering one business solution or the other.
One of such trendy blockchain projects is my object of focus in this article.
AERGO: Next-Generation Hybrid Blockchain for Enterprise Application
AERGO is envisioned to be an enterprise-ready and scalable blockchain platform created to help developers and businesses create, and manage their own decentralized apps (dApps) within the Cloud environment. Among other things, the new platform will allow developers to customize their dApps on both public and private blockchains or even adopt hybrid configurations.
Apart from its unique enterprise protocol, AERGO also offers a function-rich middleware layer to assist in simplifying integration with legacy softwares. So, AERGO will provide developers and businesses with an hybrid blockchain platform that will:
incorporate a secure and super-fast Cloud architecture containing both permissioned and permissionless chains.
deliver an open-source enterprise ecosystem for the global business community.
AERGO is not really a new concept in the industry. Its parent company Blocko, is a major blockchain firm that offers private blockchain enterprise solutions in many countries. The experience from Coinstack, developed by Blocko, will surely come handy in this instance.
In essence, AERGO will address specific roadblocks to mainstream blockchain adoption by resolving issues pertaining to:
- IT integration
- Interoperability
- Software Development
#1 IT Integration
According to Jerry Cuomo, the VP for Blockchain Technologies at IBM, blockchain has the capacity to reduce both the cost as well as the complexity of transactions - across social institutions, industries, and government agencies.
Unfortunately, businesses have found it very hard to integrate their existing IT systems with new blockchain implementations.
Why is this happening?
For one, industries operate dissimilar data schemes and disparate technology stacks. A case in point is a big telecom operator planning to embrace blockchain. The firm utilizes CRM systems for taking customer orders and sending to a provisioning system. This system triggers the order to a special shipping system. At the same time, the firm uses its own billing system to generate payment bills, in recurring cycles, once the order is fulfilled. These systems depend on different data formats for storing the generated information. A consequence of this is that these standalone systems cannot be integrated with blockchain.
#2 Interoperability
Coinmarket counted hundreds of blockchains last year. The number is expected to grow into thousands by next year. As the ecosystem expands, so does the need for blockchain platforms to communicate possibly for value exchange and economies of scale benefits.
However, blockchains are public ledgers on which every anonymous user carries a version of the truth. Obviously, this is not applicable in some industries that carry sensitive data. For example, firms in the financial services sector need to know their customers and restrict access to private data. Moreover, would you like to see information from your Forex blockchain app being broadcasted to nodes on your trade finance blockchain app?
#3 Supporting Software Development
To say the truth, new technologies often come with supporting programming languages to be learned and used by developers. However, most of these developments are project-oriented and little or no time is allowed for developers to learn or use other languages.
As a result, only few developers can effectively implement or use the complex programming frameworks needed to launch enterprise grade operations. Businesses are thus left to resolve this by forcing their in-house developers to relearn complex computing scripts or hiring expensive private contractors.
How does AERGO plan to help businesses and developers overcome these challenges?
Well, the developers have a detailed plan of action using AERGO's unique features.
Key Features
- Structure:
AERGO has three major components comprising of
AERGO Chain (the proposed public internet of blockchains)
AERGO Hub (the public interface of the entire AERGO Chain) containing AERGO Public Repository (similar to GIT) and AERGO Private Repository.
AERGO Marketplace which is a one-stop arena for trading in computing resources. The AERGO token will serve as the medium of exchange in the Marketplace.
- IT Integration and Interoperability:
AERGO will support a time-tested multi-functional smart contract implementation. It aims to use the popular Ethereum Virtual Machine to achieve interoperability and integration with external systems via the AERGOSQL.
The pluggable architecture can even support different variants of smart contract implementations, ranging from asset trading to data storage services. In addition, the platform will implement Smart Oracles which will allow communications with legacy and proprietary systems, hitherto unavailable on old blockchain platforms.
- Software Development:
AERGO will deploy Distributed Version Control (DVC) to support the creation of public and private repositories. The repositories will serve as code hosting blockchains for developers. Both repositories are quite free to use and allow collaborative efforts on coding.
AERGO Public Repository will be an open infrastructure for dApps (like a public repository on Git). In contrast, AERGO Private Repository will be a controlled structure for dApps to enhance security and quality of service required for enterprise systems. To cut a long story short, the repositories on the Hub ( similar to the AWS by Amazon) will support all forms of software micro-services.
Aside these features, AERGO also offers:
- A deterministic Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) Consensus mechanism to maximize network stability and service quality.
- A sidechain technology free from transaction fee volatility.
A domain-based partitioning technique for achieving a whooping 1 million transactions per second.
Data isolation and sharing to maintain data privacy.
Block-level parallel processing to improve performance.
Concurrency Control to achieve transaction serialization for system consistency.
Conclusion
From the analysis, it's evident that AERGO is not just another blockchain project- the platform will surely set the bar very high in enterprise blockchain adaptations, after launching. The developers promise to make it the "the enterprise platform that will do better than its pairs". Their vision of a pluggable blockchain implementation is the strongest I have yet seen of a genuinely innovative blockchain technology.
For more information about the project and its token metrics, please drop your comment below. I will be happy to read and reply your enquiries. Thanks