Blockchain on AWS

A letter of credit is promissory document used to reduce risk in transactions between buyers and sellers, usually for an international transaction. A letter of credit ensures a seller will be paid, as long as all conditions of the transaction are met.

Letter of credit complexity stems from multiple parties having to exchange and review the same documents numerous times. On a blockchain network, all parties can access a start to finish, real-time view of documents and updates on the reconciled ledger. The ledger eliminates need for traditional document emailing, faxing, and mailing while its immutable nature ensures the security and trust necessary for legal documents. Implementing blockchain, letter of credit processing can be reduced from multiple steps spanning multiple business days to a few hours.

Businesses often need a system-of-record application with auditing capability to keep track of critical data, such as credit and debit transactions across bank accounts, internal compliance and regulatory data (e.g., GDPR), or complete history of assets such as vehicle maintenance or drug manufacturing records. Such applications are often implemented using traditional databases. Building audit functionality with relational databases is time-consuming and prone to human error. It requires custom development, and since relational databases are not inherently immutable, any unintended changes to the data are hard to track and verify.

Businesses can use a purpose-built solution using Amazon QLDB, that provides them a centralized ledger for auditing and record keeping purposes, utilizing a scalable, serverless architecture that allows them to easily verify integrity of past records, trigger AWS Lambda events to process other workflows such as caching the history for querying in Amazon Elasticsearch, transforming and loading the data into an Amazon Redshift cluster, or storing the data in an Amazon S3 data lake.