Assignment 2: Persuade your CEO to switch from Hyperledger (R3 Corda/Quorum) to Baseline Protocol

Baseline Protocol Course
#22

TO: Director of Innovation@Beer Bellies

FROM: Pils, Blockchain Consultant

SUBJECT: Upgrade to Baseline Protocol

DATE: 21-10-20

Purpose: Benefits of Baseline Protocol, a one size fits all solution.

Discussion:

Beer Bellies has seen wonderful results using private blockchain but like everything in business you need to find better alternatives to make your business processes flourish, enter Baseline Protocol.

Baseline Protocol is an easy solution which can be used to automate business processes among companies. Baseline Protocol is built on the Ethereum Mainnet. It acts as a common framework where businesses can share their data but still keep it private.

It’s a middleware solution with techniques such as ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof). This is one of the main features of Baseline Protocol.The beauty of ZKP is that by using it nobody on the public blockchain will be able to see your private business data. These happen off chain directly onto the ERP system, it doesn’t need to connect to the internet.

The Benefits of Baseline Protocol are;

  • It’s a one time cost. No more yearly expensive subscriptions for your existing software.
  • It’s easy to use, set up, doesn’t require the company to buy further B2B solutions.
  • It’s decentralized
  • Pay per use, low cost solution
  • Secure, as it uses advanced cryptography techniques.
  • Speeds up transactions

A short explanation of the Baseline Protocol:

https://youtu.be/MnnBWQR6SVM

Here is an article explaining how Coca Cola is using the Baseline Protocol:

https://medium.com/unibrightio/baselining-the-north-america-coca-cola-bottling-supply-chain-f87539220269

It will give Beer Bellies the capability to mix and match the benefits of public and private blockchains. The perfect solution to increase profits.
Which day would suit you to demonstrate this further?

1 Like
#23

It would seem that by the information given that baseline protocol may be the better product, but isn’t hyperledger open source? Furthermore, I’ m not really here to learn sales. I think if a company is using any blockchain tech, thats a win. I did read some of the other posts and there may be some pretty good salesmen there.

#24

Great course again @RuudHuisman.

I was having a read of the baseline docs and even though I am a software guy of many many years I still find it quite complex tbh and hard to get a handle on. I have a few questions for you that I was hoping you could help mw with:

  1. In the context of using Baseline in an ERP scenario, in a hypothetical/exaggerated scenario… lets say I am a small scale widget manufacturer and that I don’t even have a website or ecommerce store and maybe I just use flat text files to manage my inventory, quotes, agreements, orders, invoices, customers etc. :slight_smile: - Now, assuming that my primitive system actually functions (albeit in a crappy and very non scaleable way), is it then true that if I could develop a baseline layer on top of my current system that then I could in theory interoperate with some huge company that is currently using SAP or other big ERP ? (thus open up a potentially bigger market to the small scale manufacturer)

  2. If I developed a web application/portal, and then wanted to baseline it would I need to run an Ethereum node ?

3.What are the costs involved in using baseline , when are costs incurred exactly , is it basically for every communication across the ethereum network ?

  1. Can baseline be used across other public blockchain networks , e.g. I think some are compatible with Eth, e.g. Theta network, Binance chain . (I could be way way wrong there, I am still learning :))

  2. In the simplest baseline scenario, what are the minimum baseline artifacts/services that I would need to deploy and have running alongside my backend api in order to communicate with another baselined organizations across the public mainnet

  3. If I had an baselined application and wanted to tokenize something e.g. convert a document into a tradable asset can baseline help with this ?

thanks again

3 Likes
#25

Mr. Reddington,
I have come across a potential game changer in the blockchain industry. Baseline Protocol, a middleware system that essentially combines private and public blockchain technologies. Tokenization, and DEFI are two of Basline’s strong-suits. The ability for companies to issue their own tokens, and also build their own decentralized financial product on Baseline Protocol. Zero Knowledge Proofs make the company extremely unique. One entity (Prover) can prove that a certain statement is true to the other entity (Verifier) without disclosing any additional information. When someone applies to a credit card company for a card, the company will ask your credit score, and while you give the company your credit score you don’t want that company to see all your detailed transactions etc, you would use a ZKP. This unique technology doesn’t have many limitations either. Privacy on chain and off chain, decentralized trust, B2C and B2B features and pay per use features.For all of our business relationships, I believe incorporating this Baseline protocol will bring great future success to our company

1 Like
#26

please give us the link of the blockchains comparison chart . I would like to use it as an addition information to persuade my CEO.
I like it , easy to understand.

#27

Dear project director of Walmart Canada,

I am aware of the project related to the transformation of Freight Invoice Management with Hyperledger Fabric.

I know it has helped to manage the more than 70 different contractual agreements and conditions, and simplify the processes that were run previously in multiple systems in order to account for and track shipment data funneling in from each trailer, railcar or ship through different systems that are often incompatible.

While the results are positive so far, I would like to raise some points that you may have not considered, and that will have an impact on our costs and our P&L sooner or later. These points are related to the architecture of the DLT chosen, Hyperledger:

  • Payment method: as you know, the current solution payment method is based on number of licenses, and as you know, these contracts are subject to renegotiation, so this gives DLT Labs leverage when fixing the price, given that we are dont have any alternative once the solution has been deployed.

  • Hosting requirements: related with the previous point, right now the solution runs on more than 600 virtual machines (VMs) to securely store and manage data points from thousands of transactions per day. This means two things: 1) our information is on private VMs, should we want to change we would have to migrate all this information. 2) We have to pay for all the hardware infrastructure even if we do not use it.

  • Potential evolution of the solution and interoperability with other solutions: right now the solution is interoperable with other software, however, compatibility with future software is not guaranteed.

Therefore I would like you to consider Baseline protocol, another blockchain technology which would present the following features that would better suit our case and save us more costs in the future:

  • Pay per use: Baseline is middleware that runs over ethereum mainnet network. This allows use to pay only for what we use, and as we do not have a provider, but instead run this solution on a public blockchain, there is no risk of contract renegotiation in the future.

  • Hosting requirments: we do not need any hardware, as the information will be stored on ethereum network. There is no concern about securty risks as information will be encrypted previously. This eliminates the concern of updating hardware or pay for it to a DLT provider.

  • Potential evolution of the solution: Baseline is interoperable with other Ethereum implementations such as DeFi, which will allow us to evolve the platform in different ways, for instance, financing our clients using different financial products available on DEXs. Also Unibright provides a GUI that allows to create graphically processes that will run on baseline protocol, allowing us to evolve the platform internally without the need of contracting any software providers. This will save us money in the future as with little training our team will be able to handle the solution.

To conclude, while current solution has been a big step, a further step is required in order to guarantee that we have a solution that is viable for the long term.

Thanks very much for you attention.

1 Like
#28

Dear CEO,

Having heard that the Company is using blockchain technology in our businesses, I would like to recommend one which could further enhance the efficiency and protect the security of our business. This is called Baseline Protocol.

Baseline Protocol is an open source initiative which adds privacy and security and performance features to centralized systems which intend to make use of Ethereum Mainnet to perform transactions. You may imagine Baseline Protocol as a “middleware” which sits between enterprise systems like ERP or CRM, and Ethereum Mainnet. Through a feature of it called Zero-Knowledge Proof(ZKP), transactions can be validated without revealing the information about the sender, the recipient and other transaction details. This feature has been applied by some huge financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase to its own private Ethereum-based blockchain.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/11/09/3857/a-mind-bending-cryptographic-trick-promises-to-take-blockchains-mainstream/

Baseline Protocol has the advantage of maintaining both not only on-chain privacy but also off-chain. It is a truly decentralized platform which build trust with users on a decentralized manner. This could save cost and also resistant to failure of systems and network and 51% attack. Moreover, with possible option of tokenization, this further reduce the cost of implementing and maintaining it since tokens could be sold publicly to subsidy the development and maintenance of platform.

In conclusion, using Baseline Protocol is an upgrade of current technology with better efficiency, security and cost. Not only it is suitable for privacy-focused B2B scenarios, but also suitable for transparency-focused B2C scenarios. It is a much better solution for the Company. I think all staff like me will be very glad if you could kindly consider using Baseline Protocol. I am happy to give you a presentation on Baseline Protocol if you want to know more. Thank you very much.

Foon

#29

Dear John (CEO),

We have been working successfully with the hyperledger (Fabric) technology for a little while now. Everybody working with it, even the one who were skeptical in the beginning, have seen the benefits of this private blockchain technology. Therefore, I we can conclude that our proof of concept has been successful.
I would like to bring to your attention the possibility to take our blockchain integration to the next level by using the baseline protocol. This protocol is built on top of the public blockchain network (Ethereum), but it adds important features making it suitable for our business. The most important feature for us would be to use the public blockchain for our smart contracts but still keep our client details confidential.
Something that we need to take into account is the pay per use feature of the public blockchain compared to the hyperledger. Some of our clients require a lot of transactions, resulting in high transaction and gas fees, especially the one with the more complicated smart contracts. Especially, our B2B clients would be in this class. So, we need to make an analysis of which clients might be suitable for public blockchain use.
How to move forward with this knowledge? I would suggest we start small with this baseline protocol and pick some smaller clients with easy and low frequency transactions and see how we could switch. Mainly B2C are suitable at the moment. Also, we need to have a conversation with the clients about the pro’s and con’s of switching to the public blockchain. I expect some of the clients to be a little hesitant to switch at this moment, we might need to educate them a little bit on the subject. We also need 1 or 2 people with ethereum smart contract knowledge (solidity programmers) in the near future to help us set up contracts.

K/R
Nick
Innovate or Die!

#30

Hi Emmet, sorry for my late reaction.

  1. I think I mentioned it in one of my video’s, there is no requiremennt for an ERP system. Integration can also work with a simple XL document or even email or text message (sending an approval for example). Of course it would make no sense to design something for integration purposes only for big systems, because smaller players with smaller systems communicate with bigger systems. You name it…we integrate it :wink:
  2. No, you don’t need to use an ethereum node. You can build on Baseline yourself as it’s open source. If you want to do more complex things, including integration, it is useful to contact Unibright or Provide.
  3. I don’t know about costs myself. This is best discussed with the company who builds it. Or like I said, if you are a programmer, you can start looking into Baseline yourself. Just join their community. That is the beauty of open source.
  4. Unibright itself is blockchain agnostic, and even Baseline can be used on other blockchains. I address the UBT blockchain agnostic part in the video about Unibright. I believe episode 13.
  5. Great question that is too technical for me to answer. You can ask that in the Baseline community on slack or Telegram. I trust your skills that you can find them yourself :wink:
  6. Yes. Check the latest posts from Paul Brody from EY, and some of the Unibright blogs about tokenization.

The first one is from Dec 2019, so there is a lot of info, but also good to see it develop through the year:
Tokenization
https://medium.com/unibrightio/unibright-and-tokenization-a8562f7ac83e
Liquidity Concepts
https://medium.com/unibrightio/unibright-freequity-liquidity-concepts-9ffe642ac904
Custody
https://medium.com/unibrightio/crypto-custody-security-risk-and-responsibility-on-handling-private-keys-9508a7ba4ba4
Great one:
https://medium.com/unibrightio/token-issuing-setting-up-liquidity-pools-simulation-and-trading-with-unibright-freequity-5d451b6cb636
Demo of tokenization Process:
https://medium.com/unibrightio/unibright-and-defi-freequity-trading-component-demo-4dec674b132c

Hope this helps.
Ruud

3 Likes
#31

Hi Adam, I go through this very deeply in the course. Especially the episode about Trust covers this. Thanks

1 Like
#32

Dear Mr. Hilton,

I am writing to you today with the urgent advice for you to move/integrate the hotel chains CRM and ERP systems to the Baseline Protocol in order to protect and enhance the massive amounts of data generated by guests, partners, management and operations within the Hilton hotels.

In a nutshell, the Baseline Protocol enables us to access the public blockchain features (decentralised pay-per-use, decentralised finance, decentralised trust, hosting demands, B2B and B2C), as well as private blockchain uses (privacy on-chain, privacy off-chain, performance, and auto-features).

For example, let us take the housekeeping department. Standard Operating Procedures such as items needed in the HK Trolley, the different products and procedures to clean the rooms can be available and accessible on a public blockchain within the hotel group while the HK roster and contacts of cleaning product suppliers will be on a hotel’s private blockchain.

The goal is to increase the efficiency, and transparency of SOPs and best use cases within the hotels in the chain while also providing them with a secure storage of data within each individual hotel.

Looking forward to providing you with more ideas and examples within the other Hotel departments.

Thanks,
CryptoMel

#33

Dear Karl Bedwell,

IBM Food Trust using Hyperledger technology has benefited Walmart’s supply chain in many ways, but there is a new technology for enterprises that is even better, Baseline.

Baseline allows tokenization of business outputs and decentralized finance, allowing Walmart to build their own decentralized finance products. This could be used to incentivize vendors and customers to use Walmart by implementing a reward/loyalty program.

It will also allow you to integrate with many other technologies and blockchain platforms that are emerging in the ever growing space. Let’s stay relevant with cutting edge technologies and implement Baseline protocol into our supply chain.

Kind regards,

Chris

#35

Dear Mr CEO

I just wanted to bring to your attention how the implementation of the blockchain technology implemented by Coca-Cola has allowed them to improve the efficiency of the company’s processes and the transparency in the distribution of their products. I believe that our company can also benefit from this technology utilizing the Baseline Protocol.
I just wanted to highlight that the Baseline Protocol would allow us to ensure transparency in our supply chain. This technology will streamline and automate complex transactions between the providers and our company while facilitating the use of tokens and digital assets, as well as applications based on decentralized finance (DeFi). Furthermore, this blockchain technology while private can also benefit from the many rich features of a public blockchain.
It is my recommendation and in light of the potentially great benefits that we can derive from the implementation of the Baseline protocol we proceed with a proof of concept to see the full benefits that implementing it will represent to our processes and our cost structure.
Kind Regards,

#36

Dear director of my school,
i know that it is an important issue for schools to manage student data on a private ledger.
But on the other hand, the institution school also closes itself to the public. There can be little support from the outside. For example, one student is very interested in computer science. He is characterized by projects that are appreciated in the internal network and maybe even reported in the local daily press. The radius of information remains small. Wouldn’t it be nice if this student could be discovered? The Baseline Protocoll offers a good solution for this. It combines centralized and decentralized elements. Data that must be protected can thus remain private. Information in the world can be shared with the world. The decentralized public ledger is connected to the protocol of Ethereum and the money value Etherium. If we stay in the above example, the student can be discovered by an institution. They offer him a grant, make a smart contract with him and he receives grants if he fulfills the agreed levels. Think about whether it is not useful to connect school life to the world through the baseline protocol.
With best regards
Annegret

#37

Date: 2th Nov 2020

To: CEO,

From: Florian Fahrner, Development Department

Subject: Switching from Hyperledger to Baseline Protocol

Dear Sir,

as you know, I am constantly looking for a better way to handle our business and make it more reliant, faster, secure and more profitable.

Our current Hyperledger has proven to be efficient in privacy on-chain, performance and B2B needs.

But it still lacks in the categories of hosting demands, decentralized trust and B2C needs. We should switch to the Baseline Protocol, because it offers the best of both worlds. It will open this new world of improvements to us and helps, our company to greater heights. It will also offer the combination of both approaches by adding features we could use, while removing the limitations we have experienced by working only through our private blockchain.

I highly recommend that we look into the Baseline Protocol and start building on it.

Sincerely,

Florian Fahrner

Development Department

#38

MEMORANDUM

TO:Director

CC:All employee

FROM:Carolyn

DATE: NOVEMBER 2nd 2020

SUBJECT: CREATING A TECHNOLOGY AGNOSTIC COMPANY

While the company has benefited greatly from the implementation of Hyperledger two years ago, we have seen a number of limitations too. Two major challenges we are facing right now are “a new complex silo” and capital and overhead cost of running the private blockchain.

I want to share with you a potential game changer in the blockchain industry. “THE BASELINE PROTOCOL”. Baseline protocol combines the best of both words of public and private blockchains. Its leverage the power of the public blockchain( immutability and trust) and adds on privacy, permission and performance features which meet the needs for enterprises. Baseline protocol uses the Ethereum MainNet as a common frame of reference. Below diagram shows a snap shot of the power of the Baseline protocol.

On top of the Baseline protocol there are frameworks such as Unibright Framework that helps integrate our ERP systems with blockchain with minimum to no writing code! Anyone can write a smart contract and interact with blockchain! This cut down the capital and overheads cost significantly and build up a blockchain culture in our company where everyone is involved.

Read more on Unibright framework

Baseline protocol also specializes in tokenization and Defi. In the near future we can issues our own tokens and DeFi products in a regulated way. There are so many things still to come through baseline protocol.

Read more on tokenization and Defi and use cases

I am excited and confident about this new technology where blockchains and ERP coexist , and DeFi is possible will grow our business and make this company a more sustainable business.

I will be glad to discuss these recommendations with you later on and follow through on any decisions you make.

Regards

Carolyn

1 Like
#39

FAO: The Director

From: Stephen

I would like to bring to your attention a more flexible and productive software solution/protocol, than the current Hyperledger platform that we currently use. It is a protocol named, Baseline. Baseline is basically hyperledger and more. With our current protocol, we are somewhat closed of from the public blockchain world which hosts so much value and features that could be so beneficial to the company. One of the major benefits of us utilizing hyperledger was because of the more privacy and admin structured features. However, there is a trade-off here at the same time because data is still centrally manned, and limited in utilizing the Ethereum blockchain.
Baseline solves all of these issues because it is middleware to utilizing the Ethereum platform via smart-contracts, and it maintains a built in privacy function called Zero-knowledge proofs that also provides privacy of data.

Could i make an appointment with you to explain in more detail how the Baseline protocol can be so much more productive for the company in regards to the features and added exposure?

#40

To the CEO:

The Information Age will soon change how people and organizations do business. The widespread use of the internet has enabled innovations and technological advancement at a rather exponential pace, developers building protocols that will disrupt traditional supply chains and traditional finance. The company has an opportunity to switch to baseline protocol and the advantages of that switch outweigh that of hyperledger.

  • faster performance & tx speed adds competitive advantage over business competitors. On-chain txs are only visible to defying parties - hence maintaining privacy. Off-chain txs allow for faster and scalable privacy computation.
  • Suitable for tokenization of assets and access to DeFi - which allows us to fundraise and raise capital.
  • It’s transparency-focused on business to customer and business to business circumstances in our network.
  • It’s truly decentralized but also has Zero-Knowledge-Proofs where the prover and the verifier reveal enough information without any additional information needed for proof.
  • Authenticity

The baseline protocol is still new to a lot fiat organizations today and in 5-10 years, this protocol will be one of the best use cases and user friendly platforms in bridging CeFi and DeFi supply chains and enterprise.

Thank you.

#41

Hi Michael! I just wanted to say that it was terrific to meet with you the other day! I think your vision to move the company into the blockchain space will prove to be one of the best decisions you’ve made in your life,
Just to followup, i know that you had mentioned that you were speaking to some folks at Corda and hyperledger as well about creating the architechured silo models for the private blockchain model you had decided to lean toward because of privacy, I want to tell you that I get your motives and understand your intended defenses. I think your mode of thin king is absolutely correct, I’m just not sure you are completely on the flush with what the options are in the full ecosystem as of right now.
I’m hoping we can get together again very shortly, because I want to bring you up to speed on a project called Baseline. Look I think these folks have built an interface that makes a lot of sense, not only for you and your MSPs, but also for the benefit of the end user client anyway. Listen, if we want to build something out of the box that can go from zero to 100 in 3 seconds flat, this is the best way to do it.
The biggest issues we are going to have with the private blockchain are going to be security and scalability. Besides if the model uses a private blockchain, the end users are going to want to try to customize it any way, Thais why i think Baseline is so logical. It’s an interface… middleware. It has so many bells and whistles you can’t imagine. To customize the features, so easy… it’s unreal. Think of it as a bridge between you IT system and a separate data silo we’ll call ethereum. Now I know you you think you know about about ethereum but we aren’t going to use it the way you think we might. We’re just going to use it for it’s power and efficiency by building a hybrid system acting as a bridge.
So what can it do, you might ask…
on chain and off chain privacy, by design
Hosting, performance and ZKP authorizations
Way more decentralized
PPU model ( more subscriptions!) plus ability to tokenize assets and participate in defi
Privacy for B2B, Transparency for B2C
At the end of the day, these folks can build out products, and we can deploy them! The best part is that instead of having to buy a bunch of servers to be nodes, you can spend that money instead to upgrade your IT infrastructure! Give me a call soon!

Sincerely,
William

#42

To: CEO of a Nice Bank
From: Miguel Roman
Subject: Switch to Baseline Protocol
Date: November 6th

Background
Currently Nice Bank has being quite innovative and cost saving money by the use of private blockchain solutions in regards to privacy and security. This has provide us a edge against competitors on the field who still not familiar with blockchain. We have being experiencing some limitations by using a private blockchain. Therefore combining some of the features that private and public blockchains without compromising the privacy and security of the customer data. I have realized this is possible by using Baseline Protocol from Unibright.

Proposed solution
Baseline Protocol is a middleware, meaning they provide software that lies between an operating system (Ethereum network) and the applications running on it.
The Baseline Protocol offers a set of tools that enables not just the transactions to be private, but also the logic or smart contracts and the communications between parties. And it allows for a granular level of privacy.
Baseline Protocol offers: 1) Privacy on and off-chain with transactions visible only to defined parties 2) Fast and scalable privacy computation 3) High performance and large number of transactions processed quickly and securely.
The Protocol heavily leverages Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), a kind of encryption which works a little like guess which card I’m holding and I’ll tell you true or false. The Baseline Protocol started with a specific use case for volume discounts in a supply chain.

Below one example of use case from Baseline Protocol being develop by Coca Cola.
CONA (Coke One North America), builder of apps on blockchain Provide and enterprise blockchain solutions developer Unibright have launched a project which uses the Baseline Protocol and the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet. It’s meant to establish a “Coca-Cola Bottling Harbor” which “baselines” Coca-Cola’s bottling supply chain.
https://cryptonews.com/news/coca-cola-bottling-harbor-to-use-baseline-protocol-ethereum-7318.htm

Conclusion
For all the above reasons mentioned above, I would like for you to reconsider an alternative to our private blockchain solution, using the Baseline Protocol by Unibright. This bank can still lead in saving money through an integrate solution without compromise the security and privacy of our data.
Happy to have a meeting with you to deliver a full pitch on this technology.

Best,
Miguel

1 Like