Our Developer Showcase blog series serves to highlight the work and motivations of developers, users and researchers collaborating on Hyperledger’s incubated projects. Next up is Abhinav Garg, a blockchain developer at Sofocle Technologies.
What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?
Stay Focused. You first need to set your business goals and try to determine if they can be achieved by implementing blockchain. I believe blockchain is a vast developing technology that can make business relations more trustworthy, you just need to have a concrete idea for implementation to take advantage of blockchain’s innovative features.
Abhinav Garg, blockchain developer, Sofocle Technologies
Give a bit of background on what you’re working on, and let us know what was it that made you want to get into blockchain?
We at Sofocle, are a blockchain technology based company, focused on building innovative products using blockchain and smart contracts. We design and develop blockchain powered enterprise solutions in banking, finance, and other industries. We have our own products based on blockchain. My first blockchain experience was with Hyperledger when it was in its initial development stage. The thought of permissioned blockchain in respect to transaction trust was a bit of fun. It’s easy to think of benefits related to the financial services industry and how permissioned ledgers in particular could be utilized.
What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?
We worked on several projects under Hyperledger. We intended to build solutions for supply chain, healthcare, insurance and several other fields. There are some key points that sum up Hyperledger’s beauty: loyalty, improved customer service, innovation and transparency.
What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?
We think that interoperability and privacy are two elements that have yet to be solved in an adequate way for blockchain software. I’d like to see more collaboration between the projects with a goal of achieving some level of interoperability.
What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?
It’s a very general purpose technology. It can be used in all sorts of different verticals and industry areas. Just like you could use a database in any industry, you could use blockchain. It provides a logically centralised view of data even though data is physically and administratively distributed. One of the interesting areas blockchain is being used for is identity. One “hot area” is in supply chain, where multiple parties need access to common data while needing to protect their commercial interests.
In a supply chain you have lots of different parties collaborating, it’s very dynamic and participation in transactions can change dynamically. That sort of ad hoc structure can be a nice match of blockchain because anyone can potentially participate. Blockchain does have limitations. One of the limitations is that, out of the box, it’s not good for private or confidential data. It’s also not good for low latency or high throughput data – there are some scalability and performance limitations.