AWS Challenges the Blockchain

See Amazon's writeup on their QLDB (Quantum Ledger Database) .   Do note that their approach has nothing to do with Quantum computing.  A bad choice of name which can only confuse people, perhaps with riding another hype stream.

Amazon’s QLDB challenges Permissioned Blockchain in the Gartner Blog   by Avivah Litan  |  

Amazon Web Services recently announced the preview of Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), promising a centrally administered immutable data ledger within AWS.  We predict that QLDB and other competitive centralized ledger technology offerings that will eventually emerge will gain at least twenty percent of permissioned blockchain market share over the next three years.

My colleague Nick Heudecker and I just published a research note on the AWS announcement See Amazon QLDB Challenges Permissioned Blockchain analyzing the challenges and benefits of permissioned blockchain vs. QLDB (which by the way has no quantum computing technology built inside it). (We will soon publish a follow-up research note that analyzes decentralized ledger technology vs. centralized ledger technology vs. blockchain used for a ‘single version of truth’).

As noted in our research, Gartner is witnessing four common denominators in promising multi-company or consortia-led blockchain projects, of which AWS QLDB satisfies the second and third:

The majority of industry (or consortia) participants need a distributed ledger where every participant has access to the same (single) source of truth.

Once written to the ledger, the data is immutable and cannot be deleted or updated.

A cryptographically and independently verifiable audit trail is needed to satisfy the use case, for example to prove the provenance or state of an asset.

The various participants in the blockchain consortia all have a vested interest in its success; and there is no single entity in direct control of all activities.  .... "