The interest for blockchain technology keeps growing among very different stakeholders, from developers to investors to enterprises, and is now gaining its share of market at business level. However there are still some factors retaining companies from a full update of some of their processes that may benefit from such a change towards blockchain. BIP (Business Integration Partners) developed a smart contract for a major FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) multinational corporation deployed on Ethereum. The purpose of the present work is to first address the limitations constraining enterprise adoption – like scalability, costs and model of trust – in order to compare the main solutions currently proposed by developers of the various alternative blockchain platforms and choose a suitable option among them for the porting of the application. A methodology for filtering and choosing the platforms to be examined has been designed. Eventually, the proof-of-concept has been developed and a study to assess the feasibility of the new implementation has been done. The use case taken into exam is a “track and trace” problem related to goods moving along a supply chain which involves producers, intermediaries and collecting points. The purpose is to implement a smart contract based application which can handle the movement of products in the form of ERC721 tokens and automatize the process of reward distribution in the form of ERC20 tokens upon a quality check. After the first implementation BIP wanted to investigate further option beyond Ethereum in order to find more scalable and less expensive solutions, and to better fit enterprise requirements about confidentiality of data. Through the methodology designed in the present work the most promising alternative was found to be Hyperledger Sawtooth Seth. The proof-of-concept resulted in a working porting from a behavioral point of view, nevertheless flawed by a serious bug related to RAM consumption that led to the conclusion that it is an unfeasible solution for a production environment because of its too immature stage of development. Because of the absence of any tool to automatize transactions execution and the subsequent collection of data and performance analysis in Seth, ad hoc tools were created for the purpose.
L'interesse per la tecnologia blockchain continua a crescere tra stakeholder molto diversi, dagli sviluppatori agli investitori alle imprese, e oggi si sta ritagliando la sua fetta di mercato anche a livello di business. Tuttavia, sono ancora molti i fattori che trattengo le aziende da un completo aggiornamento di alcuni dei loro processi che potrebbero invece beneficiare di un tale cambiamento verso la blockchain. BIP (Business Integration Partners) ha sviluppato uno smart contract – deployato su Ethereum – per una delle principali multinazionali che operano nell'ambito FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods). Lo scopo del presente lavoro è quello di individuare e analizzare le limitazioni che attualmente frenano l'adozione da parte delle imprese – come la scalabilità, i costi e il modello di fiducia – al fine di comparare le principali soluzioni attualmente proposte dagli sviluppatori delle varie piattaforme blockchain alternative e di scegliere, tra esse, un'opzione adatta per il porting dell'applicazione. È stata proposta una metodologia per il filtraggio e la scelta delle piattaforme. Infine è stato sviluppato il proof-of-concept ed è stato condotto uno studio di fattibilità della nuova implementazione. Lo use-case in esame è un problema di "track and trace" legato a dei beni che si muovono lungo una supply chain; coinvolge produttori, intermediari e punti di raccolta. Lo scopo del progetto è implementare un'applicazione basata su smart contract che possa gestire lo spostamento di prodotti sotto forma di token ERC721 e automatizzare il processo di distribuzione della ricompensa sotto forma di token ERC20, a valle di un controllo qualità. Dopo la prima implementazione BIP ha voluto investigare altre opzioni, oltre a Ethereum, al fine di trovare soluzioni più scalabili e meno costose, e di rispondere meglio ai requisiti di impresa circa la confidenzialità dei dati. Attraverso la metodologia proposta Hyperledger Sawtooth Seth è stata individuata come la piattaforma alternativa maggiormente promettente. Il proof-of-concept è risultato in un porting funzionante dell'applicazione, da un punto di vista comportamentale, ciononostante reso difettoso da un grave bug legato al consumo di RAM che ha portato alla conclusione che si tratti di una soluzione impraticabile in produzione per via del suo stadio di sviluppo troppo immaturo. A causa dell'assenza di qualunque tool che potesse automatizzare l'esecuzione di transazioni e la conseguente raccolta di dati e analisi delle performance in Seth, si è resa necessaria la creazione di tool ad hoc che servissero lo scopo.
Porting blockchain smart contracts. A feasibility study
d'AURIA, ANDREA
2019/2020
Abstract
The interest for blockchain technology keeps growing among very different stakeholders, from developers to investors to enterprises, and is now gaining its share of market at business level. However there are still some factors retaining companies from a full update of some of their processes that may benefit from such a change towards blockchain. BIP (Business Integration Partners) developed a smart contract for a major FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) multinational corporation deployed on Ethereum. The purpose of the present work is to first address the limitations constraining enterprise adoption – like scalability, costs and model of trust – in order to compare the main solutions currently proposed by developers of the various alternative blockchain platforms and choose a suitable option among them for the porting of the application. A methodology for filtering and choosing the platforms to be examined has been designed. Eventually, the proof-of-concept has been developed and a study to assess the feasibility of the new implementation has been done. The use case taken into exam is a “track and trace” problem related to goods moving along a supply chain which involves producers, intermediaries and collecting points. The purpose is to implement a smart contract based application which can handle the movement of products in the form of ERC721 tokens and automatize the process of reward distribution in the form of ERC20 tokens upon a quality check. After the first implementation BIP wanted to investigate further option beyond Ethereum in order to find more scalable and less expensive solutions, and to better fit enterprise requirements about confidentiality of data. Through the methodology designed in the present work the most promising alternative was found to be Hyperledger Sawtooth Seth. The proof-of-concept resulted in a working porting from a behavioral point of view, nevertheless flawed by a serious bug related to RAM consumption that led to the conclusion that it is an unfeasible solution for a production environment because of its too immature stage of development. Because of the absence of any tool to automatize transactions execution and the subsequent collection of data and performance analysis in Seth, ad hoc tools were created for the purpose.| File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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https://hdl.handle.net/10589/164511