ULedger is a blockchain technology start-up Medgadget had a chance to meet at the “Healthcare on the Blockchain” event earlier this year (See our coverage of Day 1; Day 2) . The company focuses on helping enterprises achieve data integrity through its blockchain platform. Data integrity is particularly important in light of a regulatory inquiry during which a business must prove the reliability of their data.
Working with ULedger’s platform, enterprise businesses can upgrade their data infrastructure with minimal effort and cost while gaining the benefit and reliability of a tamper-proof, distributed ledger. Flexibility to work alongside existing enterprise infrastructures without the need to directly access the enterprise organization’s data is key to ULedger’s approach and helps make the solution approachable for a range of enterprise businesses across different market verticals. The company recently released a GDPR Compliance tool that allows enterprise organizations to document an un-editable history of emails, images, transactions, and additional data types.
To learn more about ULedger’s business and approach, continue below for Medgadget‘s interview with CEO Josh McIver. To dive further into ULedger’s technology, which promises an impenetrable audit trail across multiple use cases, check out the company’s white paper here. ULedger currently offers free pilot programs for universities and non-profits interested in adopting blockchain technology.
Medgadget, Michael Batista: Blockchain is an exciting new technology getting quite a buzz today. What led to your interest in building a business around blockchain technology?
Josh McIver: I started my career at Deloitte in their audit practice. As an auditor, companies would hire us to examine their financials, data, and systems and write an opinion on their accuracy or integrity. When I was introduced to blockchain technology while I was working for a tech startup in Utah, I was immediately aware of how this technology could significantly enhance an entity’s data integrity.
Medgadget: What gaps did ULedger find and identify as opportunities to solve?
McIver: We set out to build a blockchain specifically for enterprises. Other blockchains were built for, or based on, blockchains built for crypto-currencies. As a result, they had notable shortcomings for business environments. Specifically, we concluded that current blockchain solutions don’t scale with the amount of data throughput that enterprises deal with, they don’t keep their data private while still offering a trustless blockchain solution, which is imperative in a business environment, they don’t integrate with an entity’s existing technology stack, and they don’t offer robust reporting capabilities. These are all issues that ULedger was built to solve for.
Medgadget: What exactly does ULedger offer and who do you offer it to?
McIver: ULedger is an enterprise blockchain protocol that creates data immutability without the need for network-wide consensus. This is very important for scalability. Our blockchain protocol is infinitely scalable as each company becomes its own blockchain, or blockchains, as part of the ULedger network. Each blockchain corroborates other blockchains to create data integrity. The result is that an enterprise achieves data integrity that can be relied upon by anyone or anything that relies on the integrity of data, including: regulators, auditors, investors, partners, attorneys and even machine learning AI.
Medgadget: Is ULedger based on an existing blockchain platform or your own? What drove your decision one way or the other?
McIver: We concluded that other blockchain solutions lacked the capabilities needed by enterprises, therefore, ULedger’s blockchain technology is our own intellectual property.
Medgadget: Does ULedger work with other blockchains? If so, how does that work?
McIver: ULedger absolutely works with other blockchains. Another conclusion we came to is that we must be blockchain agnostic, meaning, there will probably never be one monolithic blockchain. As a result, ULedger is able to interact with any other blockchains to achieve the goals of a given use case.
Medgadget: Uledger offers a combined public and private blockchain solution. We’ve heard about both types individually at this event but how does a combination of the two work?
McIver: Public blockchains are fantastic for trustless consensus but they are slow, expensive and not scalable. Private blockchains are much more scalable, but you have to trust those that run and operate the private blockchain, which somewhat defeats the purpose of blockchain. By creating a hybrid public/private blockchain, ULedger archives trustless consensus while also solving for scalability and data privacy issues.
Medgadget: On one of the panels at “Healthcare on the Blockchain” we heard about the perception that blockchain technology is expensive and hard to implement. What makes it so easy for an enterprise business to work with ULedger?
McIver: ULedger is integrated via an open API. Because ULedger is truly a protocol, the integration is extremely streamlined and most clients need very little guidance.
Link: ULedger homepage…
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