Blockchain as a Service (Baas): Financial and Non-Financial Use Cases
TechnologyBit News Today1 min read
Blockchain as a Service lets companies rent ledger infrastructure from cloud vendors instead of running their own nodes, and the table pairs the main hosted services with the financial and non-financial projects that put such ledgers to work. Trade finance and interbank payments led on the money side, while food tracing, container shipping and absentee voting showed uses far from banking.
| Area | Service or project | Launch | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud service | Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service | Preview Oct 2017, managed release Jul 2018 | Lets businesses automate processes on an immutable ledger hosted in Oracle's cloud |
| Cloud service | Amazon Managed Blockchain | General availability Apr 2019 | Opened with Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum promised later; first region US East (N. Virginia) |
| Cloud service | Azure Blockchain Service | Preview May 2019 | Forms and governs consortium networks; J.P. Morgan's Quorum was the first ledger offered |
| Cloud service | Amazon QLDB | General availability 10 Sep 2019 | Centralised, cryptographically verifiable ledger database; Klarna, the DVLA, Splunk and Accenture among first users |
| Payments | JPM Coin | Announced 14 Feb 2019 | Dollar-linked token on JPMorgan's private Quorum chain for settlements between institutional clients |
| Trade finance | Contour | Live Oct 2020 | Letters of credit on R3 Corda, owned by Bangkok Bank, BNP Paribas, CTBC, HSBC, ING, Standard Chartered, SEB and Citi |
| Food supply | IBM Food Trust | Commercial launch 8 Oct 2018, after 18 months of tests | Carrefour signed up; Walmart already tracked 25 products from 10 suppliers on the network |
| Food supply | Walmart leafy-greens rule | Supplier letter of 24 Sep 2018 | Lettuce and spinach suppliers told to trace produce back to the farm on IBM's ledger by Sep 2019 |
| Shipping | TradeLens | 9 Aug 2018 | Maersk and IBM shipping-document platform on Hyperledger Fabric, with 94 organisations on board at launch |
| Elections | Voatz in West Virginia | Nov 2018 midterms | 144 overseas military voters from 24 counties cast ballots through a blockchain-backed phone app |
Sources: Computerworld, Silicon UK, VentureBeat, Microsoft Azure Blog, Amazon, MIT Technology Review, Global Trade Review, The Block, Walmart, Cointelegraph, GovTech.
