DBIS

The class consists of seven major building blocks deemed instrumental for familiarizing with DLT as new means for business collaborations.
• Foundations – Distributed transaction management versus centralized databases with their ACID properties for consistency management will be discussed first. Then, DLT will be introduced as an enabler of the Internet of Value as a guarantor of ledgers for asset management as well as microtransactions unveiling new spheres of businesses.
• Core technologies – Enabling technologies to establish new process patterns for the collaboration of businesses to enabler virtual enterprises and other enterprise innovations; enabling technologies to include hashing, perception hashes, Merkle trees for the representation of transactions, consensus for process synchronization as well as tokens & tokenization for business modeling.
• Use case portfolio – A selection of typical use cases to illustrate the application spectrum of DLT.
• Design parameters – Different parameters, e.g., private versus public blockchains, characterize blockchain platforms and respective applications built on top. These parameters will be presented and juxtaposed. Moreover, a decision framework for the appropriateness of blockchain technology for certain applications is presented.
• Blockchain implementations – Any blockchain implementation consists of a network of peers and blockchain platforms. Following an overview of different implementation frameworks, e.g., Ethereum, Hyperledger, or Corda, two specific platforms will be presented and field trial in the course of the class with selected use case scenarios.
• Blockchain solutions – Blockchain technology allows one to design privacy-focused solutions similar to the ideas of customer profiling. Self-sovereign identity management is one outstanding example of maintaining and assuring identities with consumers in the driver’s seat. Managing certificates, e.g., for universal education as well as driving licenses, is another prominent blockchain-enabled service. Moreover, tokenization of assets allows one to design new ecosystems for business collaboration.
• Process automation and self-governance – Smart contracts are a natural means for the automation of processes be they for business collaboration or for maintaining consistency across data spaces. Automation is the promising potential of smart contracts. Going down this avenue, the entire automation of collaboration networks and their processes is the next step perhaps with different levels of capability maturities. On the other hand, the plausibility and correctness of program code is an essential ingredient. Different techniques for software verification will be discussed. Then, a focus will be put on model checking and the validation of smart contracts programmed in Solidity. For this, functional semantics is specified in terms of logical formulae, which builds the formal basis for model checking.