We've had a tour through the world of business networks, and we've seen the importance of multi-party transaction processing of assets between participants—it's the very lifeblood of these networks. Indeed, because of the importance of today's business networks, a significant amount of technology is already deployed in their pursuit. If you've worked in IT for a little while, you've probably heard of Business-to-Business (B2B), and maybe even Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) [protocols]. These terms describe the idea and technology of how businesses exchange information with each other. You might even have heard of, or have experience with, networking protocols such as AS1, AS2, AS3, and AS4. These define standard mechanisms about how to exchange business data between two organizations. Don't worry if you haven't heard these terms—the key take-away is that business networks exist today in a very really sense, and have lots of technology applied to them.

What does implementing a business network mean? Well, when it comes to the exchange of tangible assets such as cars or equipment or important documents, a blockchain captures representations of the assets, participants, transactions, and events in a business network. But, in the case of intangible assets it's a little different—in some meaningful sense, the increasing de-materialization of assets means that their representation inside a computer system is as real as the asset itself.