Distributed ledgers to support revenue-sharing business consortia: a Hyperledger-based implementation

Abstract

Private distributed ledgers (DLs) appear to be more successful than public blockchains at supporting innovative business ecosystems in the form of enterprise consortia. In fact, by untying transactions from the native cryptocurrencies of public blockchains, consortium DLs can smoothly interface with the various sectors of the traditional economy with the capability to innovate it. Furthermore, eliminating mining greatly increases the computational efficiency of these technologies compared to public blockchains. So far, consortium DLs have been used primarily for traceability and document management. Now the time is ripe to move forward, impacting business and profitability. We describe here a consortium model based on distributed ledger technology that applies the old principle that “unity is strength” by deploying the economic method of Revenue Sharing as a smart contract. We illustrate the model through a prototype implementation on Hyperledger Fabric, the most widely adopted among the platforms for consortium distributed ledgers.