Support and Applications of the Blockchain technology

The Blockchain architecture is a peer to peer network for transactional data sharing among untrusted participants, providing a mechanism to exchange information without using a third trusted party. Although it has proven applications in the cryptocurrencies landscape, in the industrial scenario the blockchain has still to prove its potential. In this work, we investigate the extents for the applicability of the blockchain to business scenarios, in particular in contract-based logistics and collaborative data processing. First, we define and provide state of the art on the blockchain architecture. Then we describe the two designed systems: a proof of concept notary service for the secure intermediation of the contracting process in logistics, and a collaborative Map-Reduce framework for BAR systems, both leveraging the distributed ledgers. We concretise the experience made during the design and implementation of the previous systems, outlining the design patterns learned abstracted from the solutions, reusable in future works.