Before we start with a formal introduction to blockchain, let us take you for a moment to a possible future that should realize sooner than we expect. You are on a vacation outside your home country, at a shopping mall and receive a notification saying there is a sale on luxurious watches. You haven't been to this store before. You pick up a watch and you wonder if the watch is genuine and worth the price. You start a mobile application and place it on the watch. The application recognizes the watch and displays the complete lifecycle of the watch like where it was manufactured and the GPS coordinates, where it was designed, what is the warranty period, how much custom duty you need to pay (if any) if you bring this watch back to your home country and even showing and comparing similar watches. You purchase the watch based on these details and now feel even more connected to the watch brand and establish a trust with the shopping store for selling genuine products. Let's consider a complex B2B process like an international trade finance which currently takes days to complete the trade process. If the entire workflow is automated, self regulated and equipped with enough consensus between various parties carrying out the trade, it can provide a window of opportunity for new buyers and sellers to handshake, implement and execute trade seamlessly with lot of trust and confidence. In the above scenarios that we described earlier and possibly in all our future applications, data would be a central point for businesses, consumers, and even system interaction. Now in a data-driven world, you need to establish trust and compliance between parties, you need governance, regulation and accountability through automated workflow and digital contracts rather than central authority and finally a piece of technology that can enable to realize this goal. Once these basic parameters are enabled, it opens endless opportunities to move any value (from services to digital assets) across the network in a secure and transparent way. The technology enabler that can aid in realizing this opportunity is blockchain. We view blockchain as an enabler to provide consensus on data. The consensus can be between B2B, B2C or C2C. We call blockchain an enabler, as blockchain alone will not lead to realizing the opportunities we talked about earlier.The combinatorial power of blockchain, smart contracts, and technologies like IoT & Artificial Intelligence would enable to deliver value-driven intelligent applications. While we described our vision, we are probably at the first generation of blockchain implementation where technologies are still evolving, and use cases are being realized. Through this book, we aim to provide a reference guide for building blockchain applications. The book comprises of three chapters. In Chapter 1, we will provide a neutral vision and architecture for blockchain, without getting into vendor specific details. In chapter 2 and 3, we will demonstrate the working of two widely used blockchain implementations - Ethereum and IBM Hyperledger Fabric respectively. To summarize, as part of the book, we will cover the following - 1. A vendor-neutral architecture for building any blockchain applications. 2. A detailed introduction to Ethereum and its core components. We will set up a local instance of Ethereum and build end-to-end application on Ethereum blockchain using a hands-on approach. At the end, we would cover topics around extension to Ethereum blockchain, integration with the external world and the future of smart contracts. 3. A detailed introduction to IBM Hyperledger Fabric and its core components. We would cover the enterprise capabilities provided by Fabric 1.0. At the end, we would set up a local instance of Fabric and build an end-to-end application on Fabric using a hands-on approach.
