Frequently Asked Questions

A node can run anywhere that has access to the internet, be it in your company’s data centre, or hosted in cloud platforms such as  Google cloud, AWS, Azure, etc.

Blocksure OS is supported by Blocksure Ltd, with technical support provided as standard.  Our support team can be contacted by support tickets raised via Surelink and have an excellent record of customer satisfaction. 

For your node on the network, you can choose from:

• your node being managed by Blocksure Ltd, or
• you managing your own node

No knowledge of blockchain or distributed ledger technology is needed for either option.

The first option is suited for companies that lack dedicated IT departments, for example small brokerages.  With this option, Blocksure staff manage the hosting and future upgrades for you.

The second option is for companies who have their own IT operations staff and wish to manage their own node.  Blocksure provides the code for your company to run on your node. We include a step-by-step training guide to getting started, hands-on guidance from Blocksure staff to get set up and a monitoring console for your node. Your IT operations staff only has to become familiar with our tools; our tools take care of the rest, therefore knowledge of blockchain is not required. 

In a simple Blocksure OS transaction, the node that would like to change the data (initiator node) will assemble the different pieces of data into a transaction, including old data that will be replaced as a result of this transaction. It then sends it to the parties relevant to that data. Those parties will then independently verify the transaction contents and sign it to show their approval. Finally, a special node known as a ‘notary node’ will perform additional verification on the data, before signing itself, sending it back out to all participants who will then update their copy of the data.

Blocksure OS is developed on Corda.

Blocksure OS was originally developed on Ethereum and we moved to Corda as it provides a better enterprise platform.

Blocksure OS contains a set of smart contracts written in the Kotlin programming language that are used to persist and share product, identity, policy, claims and payment data. The smart contracts also define data ownership and access control (who is allowed to view/edit/delete data).

A consensus mechanism is a system to ensure that data added to a distributed ledger is valid. There are multiple different forms of consensus mechanisms.

One of our clients asked us:

“If in the future there would be a superior new distributed ledger technology (DLT), how much effort would it need to migrate to it, or would this be nearly impossible?”

Blocksure has experience of this, having completed a similar migration early in the product’s life when the move was made from Quorum to Corda. 

Any DLT migration would require careful consideration and effort estimation. The main complexity would be determined by how much of the core DLT logic (code which resides within the DLT node itself) could be moved to the new platform and if the Corda “flows” could be made to behave the same way in this new platform. The core business logic for the platform is kept separate to the Corda specific parts. 

That said, at Blocksure, we are delighted with Corda and have no plans to replace it! The context of our summary is simply responding to a client’s question.

As a wider point, we highlight that clients own their data, not Blocksure. Blocksure clients are able to extract their data at any time via Blocksure’s APIs, which:

• exports data in XML, JSON or CSV file formats,
• uses SFTP or HTTPS transport protocols, and
• has a configurable number of records per export file.