We present an overview of Akachain ecosystem in the figure below.

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Overall, the whole ecosystem consists of 3 main parts.

Core blockchain

Akachain bases on Hyperledger Fabric. We implement various custom plugins using the Fabric endorsing and validation pluggable modules. They are important factors in our bridge protocol to connect multiple blockchains on different consortium channels.

When a vendor joins the Akachain system, he must run one or more Akachain peers. The vendor can either host these peers on their own premise systems or rent our pre-deployed peers on Amazon Web Service. The first approach obviously offer more control over the peer container. Meanwhile the vendor will not have to worry about maintaining the deployed peer if he chooses the second choice. In some case, by allowing Akachain to share the peer machine with other vendors, the cost of using the system is significantly reduced as well.

In the core blockchain layer, we also provide Certificate Authority and blockchain Ordering Service. We use Apache Kafka in our Fabric ordering service. Kafka allows high performance, scalable and reliable delivery of blocks among peers. The inhouse Certificate Authority (AKC-CA) is to ensure that all of our peers communication are encrypted using SSL. It is possible for the vendor who follows on-premised host route to install an intermediate Certificate Authority trusted by AKC-CA to issue certificates for his peers and other services. Overall, those services are maintained by Akachain and shared among all of our customer vendors.

Middleware/Tool

We develop various middleware supporting our development of Akachain. There is our own development toolkit that includes guidelines, best practices, software pattern for developers to develop secure and high performance Hyperledger Chaincode to work with AKC system. There is the user identity service so that vendors can quickly bootstrap their system towards an ecosystem where users are represented by cryptographic keys like other blockchain. We provide the token service on Mainchain, currently to enable payment for transaction on private chain. However, this token service can be extended in the future to enable an open economy for other partners to join with AKC to provide infrastructure services like ordering or endorsement services.

Last but not least, we develop a collection of inhouse blockchain management tools that can be used to automatically deploy and monitor AKC blockchain. Those tools are mostly customized towards our business perspective but we are looking into generalize and open source some tools to contribute back to the blockchain community in general that we are indebted so much.

Industry solution

Finally, Akachain is a blockchain-as-a-service eco-system. However, we can consider that we offer a Blockchain-Applications-As-a-Service rather than just merely blockchain infrastructure. Blockchain is an amazing technology and can be applied across many domains. During the development of blockchain applications, we obtain domain knowledge and experiences in developing industry solutions such as Loyalty network, Assets traceability or financial services. Akachain can provide customized services to integrate with vendors’ existing software systems in a secure, scalable and privacy-preserving manners.