Our CTO, Neeraj, first brought up doing a decentralized database about a year ago. But it wasn’t until we were developing an enterprise application for a group of banks that we saw the real need for it. This project was a KYC Shared Ledger blockchain application. KYC (Know Your Customer) is an enormous pain for anyone in financial services. The regulatory requirements are increasing and this bears a big financial cost on banks.

Th KYC Shared Ledger application we built leveraged Ethereum to enable banks to:

Onboard customers faster and cheaper.

Share information between one another.

Manage and update customer data easily.

Once on-boarded, the customer’s entire profile is encrypted and stored securely and permanently to the blockchain. We used a proprietary multi-party key encryption protocol that enabled the banks to “own” their customers’ private data, but allowed data to be shared with other banks that are specifically authorized only by the customers themselves.

Now a database stores and retrieves data, and is designed to allow the definition, creation, querying, update, deletion, and administration of the data stored within it. The blockchain can be considered like a hard drive — it is a rudimentary technology that lets you store 0’s and 1’s to it, but with limited database features. As a result, we created technology so the KYC Shared Ledger could use the blockchain like a database. But this was not ideal. We needed to write specialized code that connected business logic with the blockchain. This required blockchain specialists for both initial development and upkeep.

It was then that we decided to evolve our technology to the Bluzelle decentralized database service. With Bluzelle, we could port the KYC Shared Ledger intellectual property into a service that non-blockchain-savvy database developers are familiar with. It would do so by exposing the same API’s and following the same standards that established off-the-shelf database products already follow.

With Bluzelle, we would have eliminated any need for a super-specialized blockchain team. In fact, there would have been no blockchain-specific code in the KYC Shared Ledger and the database-related time and effort in setup would have been reduced by a large amount.

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