Insurance Application on Multi-Host Hyperledger Fabric Network
A POC Insurance Application deployed on multi-org Hyperledger Fabric Network.
Introduction
Hyperledger is a collaboration on open-source Blockchain Technologies and related tools started in December 2015 by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned Blockchain framework, which is intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture. Due to its versatile design, it satisfies a broad range of use cases in the industry and also offers a quite unique approach to consensus that enables performance at scale while preserving privacy.
Components of Hyperledger Fabric Network
- Ledger: One per channel, it is comprised of blockchain and state database.
- Chaincode: It is the smart contract which runs on the peers and creates transactions.
- Peer nodes: It is a network entity which maintains ledger and runs chaincode.
- Ordering Service: Also known as ordering node, it orders transactions into a block on a first-come-first-serve basis for all channel’s on the network.
- Certificate Authority: It generates PKI based certificates for the participants of the network.
- Membership Service Provider (MSP): MSP aids in proving the identity of the participants in the network.
- Channel: It is a subnet of communication between two or more network members.
The Flow of the Application
In this application there are four organizations in the network communicating over a single channel. Each of these organizations are named, Shop, Insurance, Police, RepairShop, each of them having their own Certificate Authority and one orderer. The creation of network has been done with the help of VS Code Extension of IBM Blockchain, where we can remotely create a network and deploy the chaincode as well as test our chaincode.
Shop Page
The Application will also have four components: Shop, Insurance, Police, Repair Shop. Let us consider a scenario where a certain user buys a product from the Shop page of our application. He will be prompted to enter the details along with the start date and the end date of the insurance, which would be the duration of the validity of the contract. Upon successful purchase, the user would be provided with the credentials for the insurance page.
Insurance Page
If by any means, the product is damaged or stolen, the user can login to the insurance page of the application using the credentials provided to them during the purchase. After logging in, the user can request for the claim of the Insurance for the same product. Upon doing so, the request will first go to the police org.
Police Page
The police can enter the police page of the application to view any Claim request for any user. The police can has to confirm whether the damage or loss of the product was theft or not. If it was a theft, the police can confirm it and as soon as he does so, a repair order will be sent to the repair shop.
Repair Shop Page
After the police verification, the repair order will be sent to the repair shop where the damaged product will be repaired or replaced. Once the repair order is complete, they have to confirm it in the Repair Shop Page of the application.
This was a brief explanation of the working of the application. It is worth noting that all the actions from buying the product and creating a contract till confirming the completion of the repair order, is recorded in the blockchain. One could say that all the actions are regarded as transactions and each of these transaction is noted down inside the shared ledger.
Conclusion
The application is not yet completed. We have completed the Backend core functionalities and the network creation and have tested our smart contract. The future work which will be implemented is the creating of a frontend to demonstrate the working of our Application and connection of the Backend and frontend.
