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Amazon is in the blockchain business in a big way. Its Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service designed to help companies quickly set up blockchain networks of their own that are scalable and easy to create and manage.
Originally announced at the company’s re:Invent event in late 2018, Amazon Managed Blockchain has been in preview for months. It’s now generally available, arriving first in northern Virginia before expanding to other regions over the course of the next year.
In a press release, Amazon told businesses that they “can quickly set up a blockchain network spanning multiple AWS accounts with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console,” doing away with what it describes as the typical cost and difficulty of creating a company network.
AMB supports two frameworks — your business’ choice of Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric. The latter is the fruit of the combined labors of IBM and the Linux Foundation — part of the Hyperledger Project, which in turn is part of IBM Blockchain, a performance-as-a-service offering. Notably, Ethereum isn’t actually supported yet, but that’s also scheduled for later in the year.
In an email interview, an Amazon representative did not explain why Ethereum isn’t yet available, and he didn’t clarify when it would be, other than to repeat the press release’s “later this year” line. He did, however, delineate the respective advantages of Hyperledger Fabric versus Ethereum.
“Hyperledger Fabric is well-suited for applications that require stringent privacy and permission controls with a known set of members,” he said, using the example of a financial application in which sensitive information is shared only with select banks.
He contrasted that with Ethereum’s use for situations where transparency for all members is key and a blockchain network needs to be highly distributed. “[An example would be] a customer loyalty blockchain network that allows any retailer in the network to independently verify a user’s activity across all members to redeem benefits.
Alternatively, Ethereum can also be used for joining a public Ethereum blockchain network,” he said.“Customers simply choose their preferred framework, […] add network members, and configure the member nodes that process transaction requests.
Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of the rest, creating a blockchain network that can span multiple AWS accounts and configuring the software, security, and network settings,” Amazon’s press release reads.The company said that AMB supports thousands of applications running millions of transactions.
Amazon also provides its AMB customers with the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) for when companies want to perform additional analysis.
Blockchain is often erroneously conflated with cryptocurrency. The association between the two is indeed close, but that’s because blockchain is the technology that allows crypto to function.
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On stage at the initial re:Invent announcement, an Amazon spokesperson said that before the company embarked on its AMB journey, Amazon had more closely examined what sort of business use cases businesses wanted from the technology. Amazon Managed Blockchain’s services and feature set is what emerged from those efforts.
An inherent tension seems to exist between the decentralized promise of blockchain and the — for lack of a better term — centralized nature of Amazon’s fully managed service. But an Amazon representative explained to VentureBeat via an email interview the various ways individuals maintain control.
“Each customer owns their own membership and has a copy of the data and has the ability to endorse a transaction (or not),” the representative said. “This gives all members in a network the ability to make decisions, achieve consensus, and have ownership.
” He pointed out that what Amazon brings to the table is an assurance that applications “will be highly available, scalable, and fault tolerant.” He continued, “This allows customers to build enterprise-grade applications that leverage key properties of a blockchain on top of AWS’ industry-leading cloud infrastructure.
”The membership drives scalability, up or down, and it gives the network some internal efficiency. “Consortiums can form without specific owners and all members need to decide who can join or be removed. This again ties into decentralization for enterprise applications,” he said.
He used the example of trade chain that requires numerous parties across international boundaries. “Each stakeholder wants to independently verify the documentation related to the trade and doesn’t want any single entity to own the record of activity,” he said.
“The current process requires trade-related paperwork (for example, a letter of credit) to go back and forth between the stakeholders, which can take five to 10 business days to complete.
”But on a blockchain, each member in the trade process has a copy of the transaction ledger, and this is where smart contracts — enabled by blockchain technology — can smooth the process.
“The business contract, such as a letter of credit, can be written as a smart contract in the blockchain application and can automatically execute as soon as all the parties provide a consensus to record the transaction,” he said.
There’s still no word on a timeline for further service rollouts, but pricing information is available on the Amazon Managed Blockchain page.
Update, 9:35 p.m. Pacific: Amazon replied to our questions after this article was originally published. We updated it with additional information and context.-
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Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst To get blockchain mass adoption we need to see companies providing blockchain solutions to existent problems and issues. The technology is complicated and has scalability problems. Amazon solution for enterprises to be able to build blockchain platforms or blockchain based applications is a good step in the right direction.- 10 1 vote
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IF FACEBOOK’S PIVOT from town square to private living room wasn’t laden with enough irony, here’s a new twist: Big business, it appears, has been invited to join us by the fireplace.
GREGORY BARBER COVERS CRYPTOCURRENCY, BLOCKCHAIN, AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR WIRED.
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journalreported new potential details about Facebook’s long-awaited cryptocurrency plans. The company is reportedly seeking dozens of business partners, including online merchants and financial firms, in an effort to extend the reach of its blockchain-based marketplace.
Facebook’s would-be partners are being asked to pitch into an investment fund, valued at $1 billion or more, that would serve as backing for Facebook’s coin and mitigate the wild speculative swings that make cryptocurrencies like bitcoin hard to spend.
The pitch, according to the Journal, involves offering merchants lower fees than credit cards.Some were quick to note that this would reduce Facebook’s ability to make money from payments in the short term. But that may not matter much—if, in the end, Facebook’s crypto effort is really all about getting you to spend more time glued to Facebook.
Facebook appears to be already building out the plumbing to make its marketplace a reality. At its F8 developer conference this week, the word “blockchain” was notably absent. But even as Zuckerberg emphasized the company’s plan to reorganize your Facebook experience around intimate relationships, his update included plenty of ways money would be involved.
“I believe that it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo,” he said, alluding to “simple and secure payments” as a core feature of his privacy-forward vision. That apparently extends beyond the peer-to-peer payments available on Venmo and Facebook’s own Messenger app.
In a series of keynotes, Facebook execs touted a litany of commerce-focused improvements: better checkout for Instagram’s digital mall, donation stickers, and a new tool for small business owners to list items on WhatsApp.
Indeed, WhatsApp appears to sit at the center of Facebook’s commerce efforts—at least to start. At F8, Facebook said WhatsApp Pay, currently on limited trial in India, would expand to additional, unnamed countries later this year.
The platform isn’t blockchain-based (for now) and is designed for peer-to-peer payments. But with 80 percent of small businesses in India using WhatsApp to market their goods, some form of payments processing is a natural evolution.
In December, Bloomberg reported that the first tests of the crypto coin may occur in India, initially as a way for workers to send money home from overseas.
An added twist from the Journal’s report is the possibility that the coin will be integrated into Facebook’s lucrative ads ecosystem. The scheme, reportedly still under debate within Facebook, would potentially work on both sides of the ads equation: Merchants could use the coins to pay for ads, and users would be rewarded in coins for viewing or interacting with them.
That reflects a growing perception—seen recently in efforts like the Brave browser, which compensates users through a token for clicking on ads—that people should get paid for their attention, not simply help internet giants make money.
For Facebook, it also presents a vision of how its ads and eyeballs-driven business could continue in the company’s supposedly privacy-first era. The idea is to keep Facebook’s coins—and therefore users—tightly enmeshed in the platform.THE WIRED GUIDE TO THE BLOCKCHAIN
“I don’t believe they’re doing anything that isn’t in the service of increasing interactions on their platforms,” says Joshua Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto. Sending money to businesses presents a challenge, he notes. Compared with friends and family, businesses are more likely to dump their Facebook coins at the end of the month in favor of real money.
Gans is skeptical that Facebook would pay users for viewing ads—an immensely tricky system to create—unless it involved something like a rebate for buying a product through a Facebook advertisement. On the merchant side, encouraging businesses to pay for ads and services on Facebook with the coin could be one way of staunching the flow of money out of the system.
As the Journal notes, Facebook’s foray into blockchain could look a bit like a loyalty-points system—tokens that can be earned through and spent on Facebook services, or cashed out elsewhere though partner merchants. That’s not without precedent among technology companies: Uber, for example, has Uber Cash, which rewards users for purchases both in and out of Uber with app-specific money.
Gans notes offerings like the Apple Card hold a similar purpose: It’s a service that, for all the talk of disrupting the credit card industry, is mostly a shiny, heavy way to buy more of Apple’s apps and products.A Facebook spokesperson reiterated an earlier comment: “Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology.
This new small team is exploring many different applications.”Facebook still faces many challenges, from sorting out how it will oversee the system to assuaging the privacy concerns of users to determining how to funnel money in and out of its currency—a process that, for other cryptocurrencies, is typically handled by exchanges.
It also has to contend with the realities of the global economic system, which runs on euros and yen as well as dollars. Even if it backs the currency with a basket of currencies, as reported, it “can’t be stable with every currency in the world,” says Gans. “That’s not how the world works.
” Hence the need to enlist financial partners to smooth transactions in and out of Facebook’s system.
Bottom line: It’s very unclear how this will work in practice. “There are a lot of moving parts. Facebook doesn’t always do what we expect,” says Gans.-
Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst FB is gearing for the 4th IR disruption by trying to hack everything they can from the new digital revolution. They want to use the digital assets' tools and its customers to create a bigger, more pervasive, giant company than now. We are sure they will be successful at least on the middle term, because they already have the followers and the global reach. However, we wonder what this mean for a decentralised global world. And for those who believe, as we do, that data and control should not be left in their hands.
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