Enterprise Blockchain on Bitcoin, Bitfury Giving It a Go With Exonum

"Blockchain, not Bitcoin."

This rally cry became a hallmark of the 2017 market boom and continued to reverberate in the subsequent cryptocurrency bear market. Entrepreneurs and institutions from all corners of all industries tried to use blockchain of footwear to use cases for everything from pharmaceuticals to bananas.

"Just give it a blockchain," the idea said, and some of the unnecessary business blockchain applications in the world were born.

Several years later, people realize that you don't need a blockchain for, well, most things really. In the aftermath of the explosive 2017 market environment, the ConsenSys blockchain incubator reduced its staff of "mesh members" by 13 percent, the State Street bank laid off 100 developers to basically close its distributed accounting arm and Ripple closed Recently the store on its Omni storage platform.

As the domino of distributed accounting books and business block chains continue to collapse, it may seem surprising, then, that one of the oldest Bitcoin companies is digging deeper into a blockchain for businesses. But that is precisely what Bitfury is doing, and it is adding Bitcoin to the mix.

Exonum meets Bitcoin
Bitfury was founded in 2011 and made its name by developing bitcoin mining hardware and software. Since then, his business has expanded, and has established roots in the questionably fertile terrain of enterprise blockchain platforms with Exonum.

Launched in 2017, Exonum is an open source solution to create authorized blockchain applications. The project has more than 5,000 confirmations from 46 developers on GitHub and is presented as a tool to "[feed] books distributed in virtually any problem domain, including FinTech, GovTech and LegalTech," according to the project documentation.

This version of Exonum is completely open source, but its latest version, Exonum Enterprise, is a blockchain as a service. Unlike its prototype, which is automatically implemented, the Exonum Enterprise offering includes DevOps configuration and support along with other tools for Bitfury customers. It is also anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain.

The idea here is to increase transparency. Business blockchains such as Exonum have permission (private), while the Bitcoin blockchain is public (without permission). Blockchains, in the case of using Bitcoin, anyway, is intended to be decentralized, (basically) immutable and completely transparent because these design features make it auditable and safe to guarantee against fraud. Private blockchains, on the other hand, do not offer any of these guarantees because they are centralized.

Something like Exonum Enterprise, then, is trying to mediate between the authorized nature of a private chain and the unauthorized nature of a public chain. By anchoring data in the Bitcoin blockchain (that is, sending data to the network periodically to reflect the status of the private network), Bitfury wants to give customers control of a private network and at the same time provide them with security and The transparency of a public network.

That's why he opted for Bitcoin as an anchor, because it is the most robust public blockchain batch.

We chose to use the Bitcoin blockchain because it is the safest blockchain according to several metrics, but in particular that the cost of attacking and rewriting the Ethereum blockchain is about 10 times less than the cost of attacking / rewriting the Bitcoin blockchain, ,said Exonum Gleb Palienko told Bitcoin magazine.

How Exonum Enterprise works
The Exonum Enterprise blockchain promises speeds of up to 5,000 transactions per second through its patented consensus mechanism based on Byzantine fault tolerance. However, this speed varies according to the capacity of the node; for example, a low-end node that creates a block every 60 seconds costs $ 1,250, while one that adds a block every second costs $ 5,000, according to Forbes. The nodes are hosted in the cloud for customers, rather than supported through internal hardware.

The number of nodes that a company may need depends entirely on what the blockchain will be used for and how many entities will operate it, although Bitfury recommends at least four for "basic scenarios."

Data from these Exonum Enterprise nodes can be transmitted to the Bitcoin blockchain in a variable way. This process, which is automated, involves publishing the root hash of any Merkle tree in the Exonum Enterprise block in