SyncTree

Unibright ONE makes it possible to notarize the exchange of business objects (such as orders or invoices) between process participants. It is recorded on chain that all participants have reached an agreement that the correct content has been exchanged, i.e. sent, received and understood.

For this purpose, objects are converted into a “SyncTree”, a Merkle tree which, in addition to the attributes of the object as leaves, also calculates hashes at various levels and displays them to check the correctness of the data. Only the top node of the tree, the “root proof,” is stored in the blockchain. Consensus can then be established via these notarizations, meaning that each participant in a business process verifies (i.e., accepts or disagrees with) the exchanged SyncTrees.

A set of individual notarizations including the associated approvals or rejections within a workgroup can be transferred back into a SyncTree of a special kind (the “TrustMesh”) and notarized after the end of the process itself. Among other things, this enables individual steps of a process (e.g., order, delivery notification, receipt confirmation, and invoice) to be stored cheaply and quickly in a highly available blockchain such as Baseledger, but the consensus on the overall process to be recorded afterwards in a blockchain such as Ethereum that is as widely used as possible.

The stored data in the blockchain is meaningful only to the participants in the process, and does not in itself reveal anything about the nature or content of the process or even about the participating parties. It is the immutable and temporally unambiguous recorded evidence that the root of a particular SyncTree was recorded in a blockchain at a particular time.

Uninvolved third parties, such as auditors, can be provided with portions of the SyncTree under Limited or Zero-Knowledge, so that all intermediate evidence can be recalculated and verified without revealing the actual content of the original business object.

The sync-tree concept is already fully implemented on API level, the fronted visualization is still in progress and will be released on one of the next updates of Unibright ONE.