Applications and Use Cases

Oracle Adds Functionality to Blockchain Platform to Drive Development


February 15, 2019

Some say Blockchain is a lot of hype, but there’s a lot more going on that that.  When you look at the companies that are investing in blockchain and developing business solutions to solve problems, it’s easy to see why there’s so much hype. 

Sure, it seems the bubble burst when Bitcoin crashed from its high of $20,000 a little more than a year ago.  But, perhaps it’s fair to say much of that hype was really about get rich quick schemes around cryptocurrency.  The real hype is around what blockchain can do for business, which is what we’re seeing from brands like MasterCard, WalMart, IBM, and many others who are leading the charge.

Another tech giant that’s never far from the action in the tech market is Oracle, has already seen a number of live applications come from its Oracle Blockchain Platform, including:

  • China Distance Education Holdings Limited (CDEL) uses blockchain to share educational records and professional certifications across many educational institutions to help employers and recruiters verify the educational credentials claimed by individuals;
  • Circulor uses blockchain to track conflict minerals from their origin at mines to processing and use in electronic components to ensure ethical sourcing of raw materials;
  • SERES uses blockchain to bring greater trust and efficiency to electronic invoicing in franchise networks, which share ordering and fulfillment data between franchisors and franchisees.

A number of other companies have also created production-ready blockchain-based applications, including several in the financial space, which was one of the key markets thought to be ripe for blockchain innovation.

“Oracle’s blockchain solution delivers enterprise performance, security and scalability right out-of-the-box,” said Doug Johnson-Poensgen, CEO and founder of Circulor.  “We started with the Oracle Blockchain Platform four months ago and were able to go from zero to a production system spanning multiple organizations involved in ethical sourcing of minerals within a matter of months. Another key advantage is that we were able to integrate Oracle’s blockchain platform into a hybrid blockchain network spanning multiple clouds and easily integrate with our existing systems and applications.”

To further drive innovation and drive the pace of development, Oracle has added new DevOps functionality to its platform to make integrating blockchain solutions into existing business and IT systems easier, and the ability to capture transaction history and current state data for analytics and integration.  New features include:

  • Enhanced world state database to support standard SQL-based ledger queries reducing the complexity of developing chaincode using readily available programming skills, ensure smart contracts can safely rely on the query results, which are verified at transaction commit, and significantly boost performance of rich data queries.
  • Rich history database shadows transaction history into a relational database schema in the Autonomous Data Warehouse or other Oracle databases, which transparently enables analytics integration for interactive dashboards and reports.
  • Enhanced REST APIs for event subscription, blockchain administration/configuration, and monitoring of network health, transaction rates, and other statistics, which simplify integration with existing enterprise IT tools.
  • Identity federation further extends authentication capabilities to work with external identity providers to facilitate consortium blockchains with many diverse participants using their existing identity management systems.
  • Third-party certificate support for registering client organizations on the blockchain network to enable them to use existing certificates issued by trusted third parties.
  • Hyperledger Fabric 1.3 support, which adds many new features based on the evolving open source version, including chaincode development in Java, further leveraging existing enterprise skills, and support for private transactions among a subset of members, preserving privacy and business confidentiality. This demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to stay current with the Hyperledger community by leveraging new releases and contributing to the open source community.



Edited by Erik Linask

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