Accenture’s approach to enterprise blockchain interoperability

Traditionally business database silos are integrated using APIs. Currently, APIs are a common suggestion and shortcut for integrating separate blockchain technologies. Accenture’s concern is that this undermines the value of blockchain which involves a shared ledger and hence doesn’t require reconciliation. Introducing APIs means you have two siloed blockchains that need to be reconciled. Instead, Accenture suggests having a trusted “interoperability node” that sits between the target distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems.

Best practice

Accenture points to the lack of current best practice for integrating different platforms like Digital Asset, Ethereum, Hyperledger, R3 Corda and others. When Ledger Insights spoke to insurance consortium RiskBlock at the start of the year, Christopher McDaniel described a similar solution produced by Deloitte. In the RiskBlock case, the aim was to enable insurers who already had invested in blockchain projects to use them on RiskBlock. But those could be using a variety of technologies. Hence they created what they referred to as two parallel blockchains. One was the main RiskBlock blockchain, but an inner one was used for integration, much like Accenture’s interoperability node.

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