Designing for Shared Ledgers in Industry Ecosystems

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), including blockchain, is increasingly used within industry ecosystems to create a high-integrity, single source of truth of shared data and business processes across diverse parties. A major challenge in adopting DLT is the conflicting demands on data transparency for improved integrity, against hiding commercially sensitive data. To address this, some industry ecosystems use multiple ledgers shared only between relevant parties rather than using a single distributed ledger across the entire ecosystem. The design problem for this is: What parties should share which ledgers, and what data should be on those ledgers? In this paper, we propose a method employing a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and Domain Mapping Matrix (DMM) to derive candidate shared ledger combinations for industry ecosystems. The method also indicates, for certain data, centralized web services or point-to-point messages may be more suitable than shared ledgers. We discuss our experiences with applying this method while developing a prototype for an agricultural traceability platform. We also present a genetic-algorithm-based DSM and DMM clustering technique to derive candidate shared ledger combinations.