A blockchain can provide a simpler, more comprehensive, approach to business-to-business (B2B) information processing across multiple organizations. Whereas Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) protocols are only concerned with the exchange of information, a blockchain can store data in a ledger, process data with smart contracts, and communicate and exchange data via consensus. Blockchain provides a holistic approach to multi-party transaction processing. In a blockchain, all the processing, data, and communications in a business network are accessed from one coherent system. That's in contrast to a traditional B2B approach where data, processing, and exchange are managed by different systems. This separation directly results in significant amounts processing to join-up information across these systems, and a lack of overall transparency. This process is described as reconciliation—it ensures that that there are not significant differences between the information at different parts of the business network—it is timely and costly.

We now see the benefits of implementing a business network on a blockchain. Rather than a set of different systems that record assets, and different programs that operate on them, there is a shared view of the asset and its complete transactional life cycle. Blockchain provides an explicit shared understanding of the asset and its life cycle, of participants, transactions, and events. This shared nature of blockchain provides increased trust through increased transparency, and that radically simplifies and accelerates processing. For example, organizations don't have to perform periodic reconciliation with other counterparts to make sure that their systems tally—because everything tallies all the time, in a blockchain.

So, let's say we want to get the benefits of a blockchain for multi-party transaction processing—how do we do this? That's what we're going to be concerned with in the remainder of this chapter—the basic architectural approach, but mostly design tools, that you can use to implement a blockchain technology platform for a business network.