INTRODUCTION

Blockchain technology is transforming nearly every industry, whether it be banking,  government, fashion or logistics. The benefits of using blockchain are substantial – businesses can lower transaction costs, free up capital, speed up processes, and enhance security and trust. So it’s no surprise that more and more companies and developers are interested in working with the technology and leveraging its potential than ever before.

This blog post series will cover some of the thinking from Erlang Solutions’ subject matter experts on blockchain technology published over the last couple of years. Across four main themes, we will explore how companies and developers are working with blockchain, the principles behind the technology, what we can expect in the future and where we all fit into things.

Theme I – 6 Principles – Blockchain Guidance

Theme II – Blockchain Myths vs Reality

Theme III – Digital Asset Ownership

Theme IV – How Erlang Optimises Blockchain

Blockchain – an overview

The world is becoming decentralised.

A multitude of platforms, technologies, and services are moving from centralised proprietary systems to decentralised, open ones. This is being driven by several powerful social and psychological factors which you can find discussed later in Blockchain: Myths vs Reality and Digital Asset Ownership in the Era of Blockchain by Dominic Perini and MIchael Jaiyeola.

A blockchain is one architectural design of the broader concept of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Essentially, a blockchain is an expanding list of cryptographically signed, irrevocable transactional records that are shared by all participants in a network. Each record is time-stamped and references links to previous transactions. Anyone with access rights can trace back a transactional event, at any point in its history, belonging to any participant.

For organisations, blockchain presents an opportunity for a fundamental change in how data is managed; from where every company has its own copy of a data set to a scenario in which all parties in a network have controlled access to a shared copy.

The key benefit of this is that traditional independent institutions can collaboratively work together to integrate and optimise existing processes to mutual advantage while, crucially, not compromising on the security of sensitive data.

We view it as vital that relevant parties from every industry are across the latest in debate surrounding blockchain as the technology is set to become increasingly prevalent in all of our lives.

Theme I

6 Principles – Blockchain Guidance

1. Software Engineering

Embrace the best practices in software engineering, in particular, the exploitation of functional programming and the design patterns that emerge from it. Develop and optimise code that speeds up the software development process, its evolution and adaptation, delivering on critical time-to-market business requirements, which is essential when it comes to blockchain!

Take a modern approach to test ensuring that a high degree of quality is preserved throughout the lifecycle of a system. Leverage auto-generated Property-Based Test and continuous stress tests combined with traditional Test-Driven Development.

Empower your software engineers to embrace modern agile software development methodologies that support scaling the workforce whenever and however needed. Practising agile ways of deployment automation, type checks, sensible naming conventions and documentation is extremely important, especially during handovers or when onboarding new developers.

Distributed Systems

Work with engineers previously involved in the development of massively scalable systems. Their experience working on messaging systems or distributed databases gives you the confidence that they will choose the correct partitioning, sharding and replica parameters.

The need for engineering highly scalable and distributed systems has grown, and this is what we do every day. Building distributed systems to cater to billions of users and transactions on a daily basis. Delivering solutions that are resilient against node crashes or bad actors, and therefore exclude single points of failure.

“Having numerous clients around the globe spanning from startups to Fortune 500 companies, Erlang Solutions has gained invaluable experience and thrives when working on complex cases and providing solutions to distributed systems.”

Yanislav Malahov, æternity founder

Networking

Find a team with vast experience in growing automated network traffic management and dynamic topologies. Check if their monitoring capacity and expertise can be embedded to allow adaptation to changing scenarios, and identify problems before they occur (preemptive adaptation).

Does their approach also ensure that back-pressure control protects the system’s capacity against overloads and increases its robustness? These modern approaches are valid for centralised, decentralised and distributed peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, often associated with bespoke service discovery mechanisms, and should be something that you clear with your team early on.

Security & Resilience

Make sure that you have the right people to monitor your system and repair mechanisms, and strategies using important resilience components. Dedicated secure p2p protocols, static analysis and property-based testing are among the techniques you should adopt to drive the security of a system. Information validation is used to protect against the man in the middle (MitM) attacks. Back pressure mechanisms protect against distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS).

Both symmetrical and asymmetrical encryptions are used to achieve the highest level of security possible. It’s also worth checking on hardware security ensuring that sensitive private keys are only accessible via hardware security modules (HSM).

Erlang is a high-level language that avoids a lot of the security issues that are an issue with C/C++ (no buffer overflows, no dangling pointers, etc)

Dal Gemmell, Head of Product at Helium Inc.

Integration

‘Blockchain needs to be integrated into existing technology to be usable and affordable.’
Arzu Toren, Global Banker

Integrating applications on top of complex backends, as well as providing synchronous and asynchronous interfaces among backends, is a serious job. So it’s worth checking if your team uses frontend facing APIs such as REST and Websocket to implement responsive applications. They should comply with industry standards for compatibility and security to drive message exchanges on top of a variety of AMQP and JMS queuing mechanisms.

In the Blockchain space, we are highly competent in designing cross-chain smart contracts capable of changing anchor data to major networks such as Bitcoin, leveraging its security against history revisions. We can provide guidance to plan effective and reliable integration tests, ensuring the compliance of data validation and communication protocols is preserved throughout the development process.

Erlang can easily interface with C/C++/Rust libraries using Native Implemented Functions (NIFs), and we do that a lot to talk to cryptographic libraries and for performance-critical code.

Dal Gemmell, Head of Product at Helium Inc.

Programming Language

Engage with us as true polyglots! We specialise in Erlang and Elixir, but we are highly competent in every other language in the industry, this could be Java/Scala, JS, C/C++, Python, Rust or Go , we stay relevant!

Vast expertise in language interpretation and virtual machines has proven to be critical know-how in a variety of modern blockchain solutions.

“Erlang Solutions is renowned for its technical talent, and having already embedded some of its engineers and architects in our development team, we have no doubt that Erlang Solutions will play a crucial part in building out an extremely strong core team.”

Yanislav Malahov, æternity founder

For any business size in any industry, we’re ready to investigate, build and deploy your blockchain-based project on time and to budget.

Get in touch with your blockchain project queries general@erlang-solutions.com or via the contact us form. Stay tuned for the next theme in this series ‘Blockchain: Myths vs Reality by Dominic Perini.

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