Amazon - Coming to a Blockchain Near You

Giant Amazon, known by many as the giant of the retail trade is also well known in tech circles as a giant in cloud computing. After an announcement Wednesday at the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas by AWS CEO Andy Jassy, it also appears that Amazon is embracing the blockchain.

Amazon has been using the Etherium blockchain framework on it's cloud network for sometime, but will now be offering customers a new managed blockchain product that supports both Etherium and Hyperledger Fabric. The AWS Managed Blockchain will scale with the needs of the application and Jassy expects existing customers will use it primarily for records management, citing mortgages, automobile registrations and history records, health records and supply system management as potential use cases.

The second announced product is the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or the QLDB. Scalability will be one of the main advantages for app developers with this new Database offering from Amazon. Jassy said:

"the product 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.”

The QLDB product is a ledger database designed to provide a "transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable log of transactions, which is overseen by a central trusted authority".

On the Amazon QLDB website, Amazon describes the QLDB features like this:

With QLDB, your data's change history is immutable – it cannot be altered or deleted – and using cryptography, you can easily verify that there have been no unintended modifications to your application's data. ... QLDB is also serverless, so it automatically scales to support the demands of your application.

AWS has also joined with blockchain startup Kaleido to launch Kaleido Marketplace, to help implement blockchain solutions. The platform will employ "plug and play" tools and protocols that “eliminates 80 percent of the custom code” needed to build a given blockchain project. This platform is expected to fill needs ranging from back-end development to front-end app user interfaces.

It is expected that all three products will work together to bring Amazon into the blockchain space and offer users and developers a secure, easy-to-use platform and toolbox that will utilize commercially viable blockchain products.

Cointelegraph also reported:

Earlier this month, Amazon won two patents related to methods for protecting the integrity of digital signatures and improving distributed data storage. The first patent outlines a “signature delegation” method for “protecting the integrity of digital signatures and encrypted communications.” The second filing proposes a “grid encoding technique” for distributed data storage by using groups of collected “shards,” where each shard represents a logical distribution of data items stored in a given grid.

There can be little doubt that Amazon is taking a gigantic step into the technology space of the future. It remains to be seen whether they will disrupt the world of the blockchain in the same fashion as they have disrupted the world of retail, but the entry of this major player has the potential to bring the acceptance of blockchain tech into mainstream corners that have, up until now, been resistant to that technology.