AWS finds a partner to push blockchain tech


Bobby Hellard

17 May, 2018

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ConsenSys have come together to provide a speedy blockchain template for enterprises, running it on ConsenSys’s Ethereum-based blockcgain platform.

ConsenSys’s Kaleido Blockchain Business Cloud platform aims to allow businesses to use blockchain without the need to start one from scratch.

Ethereum and ConsenSys co-founder, Joseph Lubin, said that the collaboration with AWS marks a turning point for Ethereum and for blockchain technology.

“This is a heavy-duty, full-stack way of getting the company into blockchain solutions,” he said.

“We have been on a mission to accelerate the adoption of Ethereum and all the benefits that decentralisation can bring. We believe Kaleido will become a de-facto standard and a global blockchain platform for business.”

AWS already announced its own blockchain-as-a-service last month, joining the likes of IBM, Accenture, JP Morgan, HSBC and even Facebook that are exploring uses cases for blockchain, which was originally designed to support the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Consensys said the Kaleido platform is different, however, in that it provides the underlying technology that records transactions on a public, distributed ledger, but also allows enterprises to customise it to their specific needs.

“We assembled a team to build a platform that pulls together – in a simple, cohesive, and unified way – the right experiences and tools,” said Steve Cerveny, Consensys’s enterprise lead and founder of the platform.

“We knew we needed to design a platform from the business problems down, since that is where the enduring problems are that companies face in the blockchain space.”

Consensys claimed Kaleido is the first example of a “dual mode” use of Ethereum that allows private blockchains to link to public blockchains – essentially recording private transactions on them to achieve more transparency.

The platform will go on AWS Marketplace despite recent research from Gartner that highlighted a lack of interest in the technology from CIOs, with only 1% of organisations having fully deployed a form of it.

In its 2018 CIO survey, the research firm revealed that only 8% of organisations had looked at short-term plans to implement or experiment with the technology and 34% having expressed no interest at all.

However, there are use cases for the technology in the financial sector and supply chains, and last month IBM demonstrated how the digitally distributed ledger tech could be used to track the jewellery industry’s supply chains.

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