So, finally, we wrap up building our LC workflow. This chapter should help you design more complex smart contracts and give you a good understanding of how to leverage smart contracts as escrows and for designing workflows. While the use case we looked at is a very basic LC, this implementation can be used to build any kind of time- or condition-based escrow between two or more parties and can be used to build very efficient, transparent, and automated business processes. You can try implementing this setup within a private blockchain between organizations and see if you can tweak it to come up with more interesting workflows and use cases.

We started this chapter by looking at how escrows can be devices in the blockchain world, using smart contracts. We charted out a multi-smart contract design for building our application and determined how the contracts would connect to each other. Then, we leveraged our knowledge in order to build a React frontend and a Blockchain backend. While the Blockchain backend issued the new LCs and maintained the LCs, the React app allowed various user roles to access and interact with these contracts. Then, we ran our entire app and tracked an LC through its life cycle, from issue to view to—finally—settlement.

The main takeaway from this chapter is understanding how to build complex financial applications, including escrows, using blockchains and smart contracts. It also gives you an insight into how business processes can be automated using Blockchain. This particular system carries out the settlement and captures and stores a document hash as proof of settlement. Thus, it's a more robust system.

In the next chapter, we'll be looking at other financial applications of blockchain technology for banking and financial services (BFSI) enterprises.