According to an article by TechCrunch, published November 28, 2018, Amazon Web Services announced its entry into the world of blockchain technology at the AWS Invent event, where it unveiled two new services called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), and Managed Blockchain.
Centralized Blockchain Popular Among Corporations
Unveiled at the AWS re:Invent event, the QLDB offers an append-only, immutable chain of records that keeps a secure log of all changes. Further, the changes done are cryptographically chained and verifiable.
Some of the features of the new service include the ability to automatically scale up or down according to the requirement, enhanced transparency, and user-friendliness, among other things.
Amazon claimed that the QLDB can execute 3x more transactions compared to the existing DLT products in the market.
Speaking about the new offering, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, stated:
“It will be really scalable, you’ll have a much more flexible and robust set of APIs for you to make any kind of changes or adjustments to the ledger database.”
More can be learned about Amazon’s new offering on the QLDB website.
AWS Also Announces Managed Blockchain Service
At the event, Amazon also made public its Managed Blockchain service which supports Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.
While the support for Hyperledger Fabric is already available, support for Ethereum is expected to be launched in the coming months.
Jassy highlighted companies’ preference for Hyperledger Fabric which allows for rapid private operations and utilities. Hyperledger Fabric is especially useful when the number of members operating in the private blockchain network is known.
AWS added that the Managed Blockchain service can scale to thousands of applications at a time and will enable users to run millions of transactions. The impressive figures promised by AWS are good news for blockchain technology which has continually been criticized for its lack of scalability.
“When we heard people saying ‘blockchain,’ we felt like there was their weird convoluting and conflating what they really wanted,” said Jassy. “And as we spent time working with customers and figuring out the jobs they were really trying to solve, this is what we think people are trying to do with blockchain.”
While the technology has received the nod of approval from several world prominent leaders, one of its long persistent problems has been its lack of scalability. Despite that, some of the recent developments show encouraging results. BTCManager reported on October 18, 2018, that a study by DTCC concluded that DLT can scale to 100 million equity trades per day.
