The original vision for our Shuttle product was turnkey workgroup and infrastructure orchestration, where each participant organization was responsible for running its own EVM client and IPFS node. Then, “messages” -- which could be any number of arbitrary bytes -- were broadcast via NATS by one participant and seamlessly routed to interested parties once a corresponding smart contract event representing the off-chain message reached finality within a block on the public Ethereum network. Each recipient could then verify the proof-of-existence of one or more parts of the payload and execute arbitrary business logic. This was not a novel concept on its surface in November 2019, of course, as organizations like Kaleido had been offering proof-of-existence services for some time by then.
Shuttle was going to be different because it was not a centralized service but a unified, distributed architecture.
Provide has been focused on designing the first production-ready implementation of the Baseline Protocol for the past year. During this time, the concept of a unified, distributed architecture has become very powerful. Shuttle is still what it set out to be in November 2019-- a workgroup and infrastructure orchestration product. It just so happens the workgroups are baseline-enabled and the infrastructure orchestrator is ready for global enterprise scale. We invested in building scalable, production-ready services for some pretty hard problems facing the blockchain community. Our zero-knowledge privacy product, Provide Privacy, serves as an effective Layer 2 in the baseline context. We also find ourselves with deep expertise in the enterprise integration space thanks to our partnership with Unibright.
As of today, you can configure complex multi-party business processes in the context of a baseline workgroup, issue verifiable credentials to invited participants and orchestrate multi-tenant enterprise ecosystems without writing a single line of code.
The above image shows a procure-to-pay business process, visually-designed within Shuttle. The first four worksteps remain off-chain, using the Provide Privacy L2. The last Invoice workstep exits to the public Ethereum mainnet. Once visually-designed, an ecosystem operator such as CONA can invite organizations by issuing verifiable credentials directly from the Shuttle UI. Each organization, upon accepting an invitation from the ecosystem operator, can use Shuttle to deploy the necessary infrastructure to their AWS, Azure or GCP account.
Congratulations to Baseline Protocol community on reaching its first anniversary and we look forward to sharing more details as we approach the launch of Shuttle v1.0.0.
Interested in Baselining your business? Contact us for help.
