Microsoft Azure Blockchain Service helping Banking and Finance Industry
Blockchain is appealing for business sectors that is leading the way in exploring the potential of blockchain is the banking and finance industry.
Blockchain is a distributed database system in which transactions and records can be signed, exchanged and verified without the control of a central party. With its three fundamentals—trust, transparency and immutability—blockchain provides a single source of the truth that is updated in real or near-real time. The result is a more connected ecosystem that ensures confidence in the security and accuracy of the data.
What are the key benefits?
- Blockchain provides a very high level of safety and security when it comes to exchanging data, information, and money.
- It has transparent network infrastructure along with low operational costs with the aid of decentralization.
- Only authorized participants to access the data and system keeps a log of all the logging entries. And the system will utilize blockchain technology to combine multiple existing data storage platforms into one.
- Since blockchain is distributed, there is no chance of a single point of failure. Each transaction is stored in the form of a block with a cryptographic mechanism which is extremely difficult to corrupt.
- Scalable, power efficient and less carbon footprint
Azure Blockchain Service
In this section we’ll focus on three important sections of blockchain app development in Azure. Azure Blockchain Service is a fully managed ledger service that enables users the ability to grow and operate blockchain networks at scale in Azure. User can perform network deployment and operations, utilize built-in consortium management and develop smart contracts with familiar development tools
Blockchain Solution, Part 1
Let’s look at a Azure solution architecture and how to build blockchain applications with confidence on an open, flexible platform that integrates with the dev tools, data sources, and applications you already use. Deploying Azure Blockchain Service is done through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or through Visual Studio code using the Azure Blockchain extension.
Base on this solution architecture and data flow data Flow in 6 steps,
- Any business apps, IoT devices, and data sources send events or data to a message broker (Azure Service Bus).
- The distributed ledger technology (DLT) consumer Logic App fetches the data from the Service Bus and sends to transaction builder which builds and signs the transaction.
- The signed transaction gets routed to Azure Blockchain Service (fully managed Ethereum consortium network) via a ledger-specific Logic App connector.
- The blockchain data manager captures block and transaction data from configured transaction nodes, decodes events and properties and then sends the data to configured destinations.
- Message broker sends ledger data to consuming business applications and off-chain database.
- Information is analyzed and visualized using tools such as Power BI by connecting to off-chain database.
Blockchain Data Manager, Part 2
Blockchain Data Manager captures, transforms, and delivers Azure Blockchain Service transaction data to Azure Event Grid Topics providing reliable and scalable blockchain ledger integration with Azure services. Blockchain Data Manager performs three main functions: capture, transform, and deliver.
Decentralized trust between banks on Azure, Part 3
In this section, we’ll show with an example of maintaining credit score information between banks, but the architecture can be applied to any scenario where a consortium of organizations want to share validated information with one another without resorting to the use of a central system ran by one single party.
Here's how data flows:
- Bank A creates/updates an individual's credit record by sending a transaction to the blockchain network via JSON-RPC.
- Data flows from Bank A's private application server to the Azure load balancer and subsequently to a validating node VM on the virtual machine scale set.
- The Ethereum PoA network creates a block at a preset time (2 seconds for this scenario).
- The transaction is bundled into the created block and validated across the blockchain network.
- Bank B can read the credit record created by bank A by communicating with its own node similarly via JSON-RP
Tech giants Microsoft, AWS and GCP are working on Blockchain. Azure Blockchain is to simplify and accelerate record keeping and verifications between partners across your entire workflow by instantly sharing data and logic on an immutable, shared network.
Some resources to look into:
- Solutions https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/blockchain/?WT.mc_id=blocktalk-c9-Niner
- Blockchain devkit https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-azure-blockchain-ethereum/wiki, https://github.com/Azure-Samples/blockchain
- Blockchain REST APIs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/blockchain/
- Workbench https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/blockchain-workbench/