A brief history: Blockchain and its use in the Mobility Blockchain Platform

Dr. Harry Behrens, Head of Blockchain Factory, Daimler Mobility

Dr. Harry Behrens, Head of Blockchain Factory, Daimler Mobility

Satoshi Nakamoto’s impact on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology

In 2009, a new paradigm in the field of digital finance, or FinTech, was born. This unique revolution is making a huge impact on the way people think about digital finance, autonomous economic agents and business models for decentralized ecosystems. We are talking about Blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology, or more to the practical point, “Distributed Ledger Technology” (DLT), emerged with a bang when Bitcoin hit the world. Bitcoin and other first-generation blockchains operate without any organization, governance or intermediary involved. If you want to participate, you just have to download the peer-to-peer (P2P) software, which is based on very crafty cryptographic mechanisms. Bitcoin’s use as virtual cash was brought into the world by an anonymous person, calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto. He published his famous “Whitepaper” in 2008 describing the key design elements for a “Peer-to-Peer electronic cash system” and then published the first codebase in 2009 implementing it. The person communicated by email in cryptographic mailing lists and one day simply vanished. Bitcoin remained with an impressive market value of over 150 billion USD (as of Nov. 20, 2019).

Smart contracts: programmable financial agents embedded into DLT

To continue in the history of Blockchain, Ethereum and “smart contracts” evolved, which are combining the already impressive capability and capacity for decentralized, disintermediated finance with full programmability. This brought the technology within the reach of ventures and enterprises. A smart contract is code running in virtual machines embedded into each DLT node. Accordinglybusiness logic can be applied to the way the ledger calculates and executes each transaction.

DLT, IoT and digital identities – how Daimler Mobility is using Blockchain

In addition to the obvious disruptive potential, this has for the whole area of payments and finance, the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Factory has identified several converging technologies. These technologies make it possible to create functional, production-ready business systems in the area of mobility and financing, and in general they can apply to almost any pay-per-use service delivery.

By combining DLT with IoT, or smart devices that turn physical objects into networked software agents and digital identities, signatures and eContracting, we are now able to create hyper automated decentralized or federated service platforms. These service platforms provide a very “fat protocol” which handles all aspects of the actual transaction execution: authentication, authorization, contract signing, “switching”, accounting and settlement.

Due to the P2P decentralized architecture, sequential process integration including the integration of transaction, billing and accounting systems is not needed anymore. The DLT platform handles all of it, in real-time, fully synchronized. As a result, enterprises can focus on the actual business logic through what now become “thin apps”, an application layer that is much lighter and therefore easier to develop. This provides unheard of horizontal scalability (for on-boarding, roll-out, deployment and operation).

To specify: The Mobility Blockchain Platform

The Mobility Blockchain Platform (MBP) is such a decentralized transaction platform, which provides four key functions:

1. One-click rental and eContracting based on digitized and standardized identity and KYC protocols.

2. On-chain notarization of all contractual agreements and signatures complete the picture.

3. Seamless access control and fully-electronic securely verified billing records.

4. End-to-end settlement of invoicing, booking, liabilities and settlement based on a Corda-based Distributed Ledger.
In a nutshell - Blockchain has arrived on every CIO´s technology horizon.

Blockchain, or Distributed Ledger Technologies, provides a very powerful technology to build “fat protocol” platforms, which can provide a large part of transaction orchestration, execution and settlement.

The convergence of IoT, the connected car and Digital Identities present a strong suite of base technologies to establish decentralized platform ecosystems.
We believe the technology to be approaching first-level maturity.