Why Ethereum didn’t work out for DocuSign (and how Taraxa is different).

Companies can determine whether they should invest in blockchain by focusing on specific use cases and their market position.

Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value? McKinsey.

How about purpose-built, niche chains?

We recently learned that Docusign passed on a blockchain integration for protecting identities because it is too expensive and slow. The promise of Ethereum 2.0 might be alluring, but its node design indeed prevents rapid-fire transactions per account, while the execution layer bottlenecks business logic as it needs to accommodate state reversion. Ethereum’s limited computation model and PoS consensus bring along high fees and severely bottlenecked throughput, with the network fees driven by supply and demand and gas spent to skip ahead of the line, rather than paying for the actual production cost of running a node.

What every business wants from blockchain systems is cryptographic certainty. To leverage blockchain for more agility and speed, you’d need to carefully consider all the limitations of smart contract functionality for your concrete business use case. Just like everything else, there is no one-size-fits-all blockchain — some chains work better than the others for certain use cases. That’s why tracking and verifying documents and signatures on the Ethereum chain that was created mostly for scripting financial transactions, doesn’t sound like a very good idea.

Niche public chains purpose-built for specific applications have already proved their cost-effectiveness and immediate business value for many companies. Just like Algorand with its native protocol-level integration for financial instruments targets the financial use case, or Flow was designed for in-game NFTs, there needs to be a blockchain explicitly made for tracking and auditing records. And that’s exactly what we here at Taraxa have been working on for the past three years.

First scalable blockchain for auditing everyday business transactions.

Taraxa’s public ledger is built for highly parallelizable, stateless audit logging. And since audit logging is business logic, our chain has optimized the logic processing that are orders of magnitudes faster, not just coin transfers like other finance-focused chains. Here are some more of the optimizations we made for the use case:

• Audit logging requires a massive scale: Taraxa’s block DAG topology has sub-second inclusion latency and enables simultaneous transactions per account at a time.
• Audit logs are stateless: Taraxa’s concurrent execution takes advantage with no risk for conflicts.
• Audit logs require true finality: Taraxa never forks and has no state reversions.

How exactly can Taraxa benefit DocuSign?

Recording a DocuSigned agreement to the blockchain lets every party track and verify a document’s lifecycle. One-way cryptographic hashes set documents in stone so that no one could go back and tamper with the file. For the DocuSign use case, our flagship application will add security and auditability to sensitive commercial contracts in every e-signature transaction by keeping confidential third-party data on company premises, while hashing the e-signatures on Taraxa blockchain to verify the signee’s identity.

‘Even so, Casey is optimistic about blockchain, especially for protecting identities online’.

For DocuSign’s Trust Service Provider, our distributed identity management tools will help to authenticate the signees. Cryptographically secured private keys to let the parties securely log in and authorize contracts eliminating the risk of signature forging and identity theft.

The best part is that we look way beyond formal contracts.

Unlike commercial, legally-binding contracts that are tracked by tons of sophisticated software, informal, everyday agreements that take up to 80% of all agreements in the world remain largely uncaptured and unverified. For the end-user, the financial loss and disputes associated with this can be drastic. This problem persists in almost every vertical — from peer-to-peer ending to construction change orders.

Taraxa aims to solve this problem by tracking off-chain and off-line transactional agreements, using audit logs to hold stakeholders in informal, unstructured agreements accountable, thereby making the agreements themselves trustworthy. If you’d like to learn more about how our application can help you fortify every informal contract with DLT, please reach out to partnerships@taraxa.io