ViewFin Metaverse Case Study

ViewFin Metaverse is a fintech company focusing on blockchain technologies. Boasting a team of domestic and international experts with backgrounds in blockchain, finance, the internet, and consulting, ViewFin Metaverse aims to provide digital solutions to customers from a similarly wide range of sectors such as finance, business, art, medical, and philanthropy. ViewFin Metaverse currently has two principal lines of business. The first is creating the public blockchain in China named Metaverse, a service framework that integrates digital assets, digital identities (Avatar), and intermediaries (Oracle) to form a unique blockchain foundation platform for blockchain developers and ordinary commercial users. Through this platform, a user can register digital assets, create a digital identity, and identify intermediaries through a few simple steps. The second business line is building the Metaverse BaaS, through which enterprises and individuals can order bespoke, Metaverse-based services from blockchain solution providers.

ViewFin Metaverse is a rapidly growing company that has been dedicated to the research and development of blockchain technologies since its founding in 2014. Even though blockchain applications only took off two years ago, ViewFin Metaverse, being one of the first to promote the concept of public blockchain, hopes to leverage the technology to provide users with independent, self-regulated public blockchain services that build on digital assets, digital identities, and intermediaries, thereby creating an open ecosystem that could freely disseminate digital values and enable global value transfer services.

During its meteoric rise, ViewFin Metaverse faces two challenges: First, building a company from the ground up, it needs to cope with its rapidly growing business and data needs; second, as its business expands, the shortage of development and maintenance staff becomes more apparent. To address these two challenges, ViewFin Metaverse must choose a suitable cloud service to power the public blockchain and its applications (i.e., Metaverse) as well as to provide customers with complete BaaS solutions. Additionally, the implementation of public blockchain technology imposes certain inherent, special requirements on the IT infrastructure. “Blockchain may look like something that can be readily achieved with existing technologies; but in reality, it is hardware-intensive, particularly for consensus algorithm like DPoS. Other consensus algorithms such as PBFT move a lot of data, therefore require high system stability,” explains Chen. “Blockchain applications often need to be deeply integrated with traditional web applications. And to run public blockchain services in a high-concurrency setting, we need a cloud platform that offers both high bandwidth and rock-solid stability.” After trying out several mainstream options, ViewFin Metaverse chose AWS.

AWS Cloud’s secure and reliable architecture, outstanding stability, complete security mechanism, and global coverage are the key reasons why ViewFin Metaverse chose AWS. “Due to the rapid growth of ViewFin Metaverse, we wish to commit our limited human resources to developing our core products. AWS provides us with a mature, stable, and complete solution that covers computing, storage, database, security, mobile service, network and content distribution, analysis, management, machine learning, and more. It offers everything we need,” says Chen.

Outstanding Stability

To ViewFin Metaverse, Metaverse BaaS is not a “blockchain-as-a-service” for users in merely the technical sense, but also creates commercial values – it is a business-oriented BaaS. For example, ViewFin Metaverse had a customer in the education sector who wanted to solve a thorny issue with blockchain, but was not conversant with the technology. ViewFin Metaverse staff worked with the customer to analyze its needs and usage scenarios, then designed the architecture, proposed a solution, and finally implemented it on the AWS Cloud. During this process, rapid building and deployment could give the customer a more direct feel of the product prototype; following product launch, the stability of the cloud platform would also directly translate into stability of the customer’s BaaS application. Compared with other cloud platforms, AWS has clear advantages in stability: performance fluctuations and PaaS faults are exceedingly rare.

Complete Security Mechanism

The security of cloud platform relies on not only robust technologies, but also strict security mechanism. AWS Cloud applies rigorous security service standards, particularly in user authentication. For example, when using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), if the user forgets the public key and cannot log in, he must attach the drive to another instance, instead of resetting the password as with other cloud platforms. “While it may look inconvenient, this not only promotes proper operation and maintenance practices, possibly harden the entire system, but also raises our own awareness for security,” noted Chen. From a technical perspective, the intelligent, security-conscious design of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables users to create and manage AWS users and groups, as well as configure privileges to permit or deny access to AWS resources, according to their needs, thereby achieving full system protection.

Global Coverage

ViewFin Metaverse serves enterprise customers home and abroad, and therefore needs to run its business at a global level. The AWS Cloud spans 55 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions and 1 Local Region around the world (as of October 11, 2018), enabling users to easily deploy their applications – through the same services and technologies hosted at different locations around the world – to cover end users across multiple geographic regions. With AWS Cloud, ViewFin Metaverse was able to deploy servers in multiple locations in minimum time, which helped expand its overseas businesses.

ViewFin Metaverse started using AWS and deploying its Metaverse BaaS on the AWS Cloud in late March, 2017, and officially launched the product in May, 2017 following one month’s testing. At present, ViewFin Metaverse has deployed all components of its principal business on the AWS Cloud, including the official product website, blockchain big data analysis, seed nodes of the public blockchain, blockchain browser, digital asset management system, and operation BI system, among others. It currently uses Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon EMR, Amazon RedShift, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), IAM, and AWS Developer Support.