ZynerTrail

I am excited to announce that our first blockchain product “ZynerTrail” is out in the market. It is a generic blockchain platform to trace the origin and properties of your products in real time.

Advantages over Traditional Approach

In the past, we used to record all properties, log, history, etc of a product using a traditional database. This “centralized” approach comes with the following drawbacks:

• Usually, only one party is responsible for managing the data
• If the single party changes the data, there is no way for users to know who, when and what are changed
• If the single platform is down, data will not be available.

Blockchain technology can address these issues with the following properties:

Immutable – data can’t be changed once created
Traceable – track who create/change/delete and when
Transparent – data owned/managed by parties with permission
Available – platform de-centralized without service down-time

User Cases

Below are 2 real life examples that make sure of our product:

1. Food Safety

• Scan QR code using your mobile or type in serial number on desktop

• Properties and production history of product displayed

2. Branding for Premium Goods

• scan the QR code printed on your product

• display the timeline of your product (e.g. who’s the artist, participate in which exhibitions, what award it received, etc)

• link to articles which further describe your product

 

• up-sell/cross-sell other products

Of course, our blockchain product can apply to any industry (e.g. Supply Chain, Retail & Consumer Goods, Banking & Finance, Healthcare, Education…… )

Customization

Our product can be customized in just 3 simple steps.

Step 1. Frontend Presentation

Firstly and most importantly, need to define how to present your product. For example, it can be a timeline that shows the history of your product on mobile or web.

Step 2. Define Data Model

Secondly, need to define the data that need to store in the blockchain, in what format it should exist and how they should link to each other.

Step 3. Make Back-end Adaptations

 

Finally, we need to customize the back-end admin system so that data can be managed easily. API is available as well to add/modify/delete blockchain data in batch mode.

Behind the scene

Though the end-product looks simple, the technologies behind are quite involved. To give you a simplified picture, our platform consists of the following components:

 

• Blockchain infrastructure
• Smart Contracts
• Dapp
• Frontend Mobile/Web Applications UI
• Backend Admin

Blockchain As A Service (BAAS)

Out of the above components, the investment on building the “Blockchain Infrastructure” is the highest. To give you an idea, a minimal up and running blockchain infrastructure should consists of:

1. Orderer
2. Certificate Authority
3. Messaging System (e.g. Kafka+Zookeeper)
4. State DB (e.g. CouchDB)
5. Peers
6. Command Line Interface

We have addressed this issue by offering Blockchain as a Service. We can setup “channel” and “peer” nodes for your company on the fly. The service is charged on monthly basis. In this way, you can minimize your upfront investments on blockchain technologies. And when your service expands, you can add more resources on top or even build your own blockchain infrastructure.

Contact Us

Interested to add more values to your products using the latest blockchain technologies? Please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are reachable anytime at www.zynersoft.com.

The Problem

Nowadays, managing a supply chain is becoming much more complicated than before. A supply chain can have over hundreds of workflows, many suppliers or vendors involved, participants span over multi-geographical locations, cycles extend over months or even years, etc.

As examples, it’s very difficult to know what the shipment status of your goods, where ingredients of your meal originates from, trace the trading records of your jewelry…

The Solution

Blockchain comes into help in the following aspects:

• Transparency & Traceability
  anybody who have the permission can participate in a blockchain by joining as a “node”. Being a “node” on the blockchain is actually owing the data. On the other hand, any data changes made by one participant are visible to and checked by every other participants in the blockchain platform.
• Increase Security
  information inside the blockchain can only be added, but not edited or deleted (once data is being recorded, it’s chained together making it impossible for anybody to change). Any change is recorded as a visible addition to the datastore, making it immutable.
• Automation
  a blockchain smart contract is a digital agreement that self-executes when predetermined conditions are met. These code-based contracts enable agreed upon actions (such as shipments and payments) to occur automatically, immediately and without intermediaries, upon the satisfaction of contract terms. For example, we can automate the payment release process when customer confirms the receipt of their goods.
• Time and Cost Saving
  There is no need for a blockchain platform to have a single party for authoritative control. This can save a lot for time and cost for setting up a central party for data ownership/administration and the trouble of synchronizing data with the peers.

Requirements for the Blockchain Platform

There are plenty of blockchain platforms out there in the market. For us, it has to fulfil the following requirements:

• Permissioned
  In contrary to public blockchain platform such as bitcoin, the one we are building is restricted to be accessed by parties with permissions only. In other words, we need to choose a “permissioned” type of blockchain platform. It should uses access control lists (ACLs) to manage access to resources by associating policies which specify rules that evaluates to true or false, given a set of identities
• Channel for private communication
  for the blockchain platform we are building, the feature of sharing data only with certain parties is needed. For example, we have vendors A & B and customers C & D in our platform. All participants have the possibility of sharing information with each other. But for a particular product, price information can only be shared between vendor A and customer C only.
• Production ready
  Although a lot of platforms in the market are feature-rich, only few of them are tested extensively and production-ready. We need a proved one that has good community support and is already running in the market.

The Choice

Considering all the above requirements we have, Hyperledger (initially contributed by Digital Asset and IBM) is the best choice. It is actually an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools, started by the Linux Foundation. In building our platform, we will make use of the following projects:

Hyperledger Fabric is the main project for the blockchain framework implementation.

Hyperledger Composer is a set of collaboration tools for building blockchain business networks that make it simple and fast to create smart contracts and blockchain applications.

Hyperledger Explorer is to used create a user-friendly Web application. It can view, invoke, deploy or query blocks, transactions and associated data, network information (name, status, list of nodes), chain codes and transaction families, as well as any other relevant information stored in the ledger.

In the coming articles, we will go through how we build our blockchain platform for supply chain using the Hyperledger projects mentioned above. See you soon. Cheers.