Building a Supply Chain Management System on Horizen Ecosystem
Cryptocurrency has opened up access to financial services for worldwide users nowadays. The radical new way of making payment has found acceptance and DeFi or decentralized finance has almost become a movement. Institutional money has started to flow into this industry. It is very clear that cryptocurrency is a rising element in the digital economy. Financial service is only a use case of blockchain technology! The technology can provide the building blocks for various other use cases. Decentralization, transparency and immutability – are the characteristics of blockchain technology and they can generate a plethora of opportunities in diverse sectors. Let’s discuss how Horizen’s Zendoo can be used to build a supply chain management system.
Horizen’s Zendoo Protocol
Horizen is a general-purpose blockchain that is composed of the main Horizen blockchain and sidechains. The mainchain is a blockchain like Bitcoin that follows Equihash Proof-of-Work. The sidechains are decoupled and independent of consensus or any other design details. The core protocol acts as a ‘truth engine’ whereas heterogeneous consensus is maintained across the ecosystem due to the varied nature of sidechains. The sidechains can follow PoS, DAG or any other distributed consensus system. Zendoo is Horizen’s cross-chain protocol that became live on mainnet in December 2021. It completed Horizen’s transition from a privacy-focused cryptocurrency to a cross-chain platform enabling the creation of fully decentralized blockchains and applications.
Zendoo is also Horizen’s scaling solution that introduces a new level of scalability and flexibility. Custom-built private or public blockchains can be created very easily using Zendoo SDKs. These SDKs remove significant development complexity and help you to build your application-specific blockchain. Blaze is one such SDK that enables you to launch a high-speed blockchain with TPS (transaction per second) up to 1,000. Zendoo tutorials and guides are available here. Also, check the Github of Horizen if you want to build with Zendoo.
The Zendoo platform can support up to 10,000 blockchains running in parallel and thus the total network can support up to 10,000,000 TPS. The sidechains can be kept entirely private or selective information can be protected using the zero-knowledge cryptographic tools. The option remains with the developers and Horizen comes with in-built zk-SNARKs. Zk-SNARKs allow confirmation of private blockchain transactions on the main chain while concealing details. The blockchain design of Horizen does not need separate tokens for application-specific sidechains. ZEN, the native utility token of Horizen, is the common token for the Horizen ecosystem.
The problem faced by the supply chain industry
The supplier, customer and intermediaries of a supply chain are linked physically and information flow happens continuously. Effective supply chain management can lower costs, speed up delivery and mitigate risk. Big multinationals or conglomerates often develop their own customised supply chain management system but they lack robustness. The flexibility of such solutions is another issue as technology continues to change. Small and medium enterprises can’t go for customised solutions due to the requirement of high investment and lack of IT infrastructure. The customers have also become more demanding! They want a lot of information other than the basic shipping logs. Existing supply chain management systems are unable to monitor the pre-delivery stages. Even post detection of a problem, it is not understood at which level it occurred. So, problem elimination becomes a cumbersome task. There is also a growing demand across the world regarding the transparency of the supply chain of a business.
How to solve the problem with Zendoo?
A supply chain management application-specific sidechain can be created with the help of Zendoo SDK. The sidechain will connect every participant in the supply chain and provide great transparency. Data will be uploaded to the blockchain using smart contracts on real-time basis and everything will be auditable. Suppose, there is an outbreak of health hazards in poultry products. With the help of blockchain technology, the outbreak origin can be easily detected by all participants of the supply chain. It will not only ensure speedy action but also ensure the reliable standard of the product. The use of blockchain technology will reduce the supply chain management cost drastically. But how to hide confidential data from public reach? The in-built zk-SNARKs of Horizen will help to hide the classified data. The private blockchain transactions will be confirmed on the main chain but the details will be concealed.
Hey dev, before you jump!
Sounds interesting? The Zendoo sidechain SDK is available on 64-bit versions of Linux and Windows. The SDK needs Java 11 or newer, Scala 2.12.10+ or newer, and the latest version of zen. The developmental kit can be downloaded from this Github link. This sidechain installation guide can be very useful to you. Once you have completed the necessary steps, you can start writing the codes. Join the vibrant Discord of Horizen and look for #dev-chat to interact with other fellow developers.
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