March 1, 2018: Cryptocurrencies and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are taking the world by storm, and there is an explosive growth of interest in these domains worldwide. The emergence of wholly new fields such as Cryptoeconomics and Cryptofinance show the level of acceptance of these technologies.
InApp had been studying the domain for some time now, and in December 2017, had decided to launch a small team to develop products in DLTs. After an initial study, the team decided to start with the Hyperledger family of products from Linux Foundation, and in particular, the permissioned blockchain initially developed by IBM, Hyperledger Fabric. Permissioned blockchains, in contrast with public blockchains such as Ethereum, insulate enterprise applications from the uncertainties and vagaries of the public blockchain (for instance, totally unrelated events such as Cryptokitties, whose activity surges may impact the responsiveness of the network), while also providing differential access privileges which are important for enterprises.
InApp’s first product on this platform is iWitness, an enterprise virtual notary system. Operating as an Android app, iWitness allows users in the Enterprise ecosystem to store any kind of document, image, video or audio recording together with metadata such as name, description and hashtags and multiple timestamps. Once stored on the blockchain, the data is immutable, and if there is any unauthorized access or attempt to edit stored data (through internal misuse or external intrusion, for instance), the system detects such as access. Thus, this record-keeping system is as good as a public notary, as even the enterprise itself cannot make even the minutest change in artifacts thus stored on the blockchain.
InApp’s competencies extend to the Hyperledger family (Iroha, Sawtooth Lake, Indy) as well as to other permissioned DLTs on Ethereum (Quorum, and the emerging Plasma).
