Design and Implementation of BlockAPI - a Blockchain-as-a-Service Platform

Abstract

Organisations wishing to leverage blockchain technology's (BCTs) in their value chain processes are often deterred by the high costs to build and maintain blockchain-based solutions and infrastructure, and a lack of both organisational technical know-how and buy in from management. To remedy this, we develop BlockAPI, a lightweight Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, primarily for use in multi-stakeholder environments that required trusted data. BlockAPI BaaS exposes access-controlled application programming interface (API) endpoints for organisations to send data to and verify data on a blockchain network. The BlockAPI BaaS platform is used by applications in logistics, manufacturing, farming and financial services, and enables these use cases to easily and cost-effectively integrate blockchain technology as a trust registry in their SC processes and existing business systems, thereby lowering the cost and technical know-how barriers to BCT adoption in the process. Future work includes adding support for minting non-fungible tokens and conducting a robust performance evaluation.