By Sergey Tsuprikov, NTR Lab Blockchain specialist

Blockchain technology continues to develop rapidly both in Russia and the worldwide. According to some recruiting agencies, the demand for blockchain specialists in just the Russian Federation has grown 40 times over the past six months.

There have been conducted about 10 hackathons for blockhain solutions in Russia over the past year. Many large Russian banks, such as Sberbank, Alfa Bank, Otkritie Bank, RosEvroBank, continue pilot projects to implement blockchain in their business processes and some have already switched its to commercial operations.

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NTR Lab is also hyperactive in the blockchain trend. Recently NTR Lab specialists have analyzed possible blockchain solutions for the implementation of promising e-Commerce projects.

Of course, they paid special attention to the open source solutions of the Hyperledger consortium, hosted by the Linux Foundation. Fabric from IBM and Sawtooth from Intel look the most attractive and mature from all the solutions in the umbrella structure of the consortium; both have reached version 1.0, meaning suitable for commercial operations.

As of today, the Fabric solution is the most popular in the world, thanks to strong promotion from IBM, as well as from other companies — members of the Hyperledger consortium. Most banks use Fabric in own blockchain projects, relying on IBM’s high level of banking expertise.

Nevertheless, Sawtooth from Intel also continues to conquer the market, largely due to its compatibility with Ethereum, the blockchain platform for ether crypto currency support. Now ether is recognized as #2 after bitcoin by the world’s market capitalization. In particular, smart contracts, the most popular blockchain toolkit, can be easily transferred to Sawtooth from Ethereum, which has Solidity, the built-in language for their development.

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