In 2015, Vaideeswaran Sethuraman started ‘Terraa’, a farm-to-fork delivery platform. While working on the business, he realised the massive challenge that exists in the process of delivering fresh produce from farm to customers’ doorsteps. A true problem solver by nature, he built a cutting-edge supply chain system that filled the leaks in the system and helped him reach his goal of delivering fresh produce directly from farm to consumers. Two years later, his company was acquired by a big conglomerate.
But his quest to build an integrated, multi-tier supply chain technology orchestration platform continues and that led to the birth of Param.
⦃param⦄ is built on a proprietary blockchain ledger that enables companies to have a supply chain protocol for enterprise interconnect, data exchange and trust. In simpler terms, ⦃param⦄ enables multi-tier synthesis for knowledge, commerce, and information across suppliers for enterprise clients.
To know more about the unique project, we had a deep conversation with Vaideeswaran who shared his vision about the proprietary blockchain protocol he has built and his end goals.
AIM: What are the challenges in the supply chain and why are Web2 solutions not enough for solving these problems?
Vaideeswaran: A supply chain transaction has many parties involved—freight forwarder, transporter, custom officials, agents and customers. These parties use different solutions for each purpose and are not completely in sync with each other.
But, the supply–chain is all about sharing information across enterprises and in the absence of it, people don’t get any real time visibility. Due to this, there’s a cascading effect on the entire process such as delivery, manufacturing, amount payables, amount receivables and other issues.
There’s a huge distrust among Web2 solutions, which stops them sharing data among each other and that has been the fundamental challenge in supply-chain.
AIM: How is Param plugging the gap in the current supply chain system?
Vaideeswaran: When I say that ERPs are working in silos, it means that each enterprise is disconnected from each other. For instance, Walmart and Unilever probably do thousands of transactions every year. But, both organisations use different softwares for the supply-chain management.
So, we need to find a way to interconnect this disconnected world through some kind of a common platform. That’s where Param Network offers its proprietary blockchain solution. It interconnects all these enterprises and allows them to share information and data freely in a digital readable format.
We provide a blockchain-based solution which connects all the enterprises together and brings transparency in the supply–chain while keeping the data safe. In our experience, clients have been able to realise cost savings of up to 20% by tracking material movement digitally, as it changes hands.
AIM: Why did you build a proprietary blockchain to provide your solution? Please tell us more about it.
Vaideeswaran: One of the main pain points for enterprises today is that they fit their requirements into generic software solutions, which is causing a lot of friction in the workflows.
To address this problem of generic software in the supply–chain, we launched a customised blockchain ledger which allows businesses to have a supply–chain protocol for corporate connectivity, data interchange, and trust. We offer multi-tier synthesis for knowledge, commerce, and information across suppliers.
On the technology part, there are two levels of consensus we can talk about—blockchain as a basic fundamental block and consensus mechanism. For consensus mechanisms, we use the RAFT consensus algorithm.
RAFT states that each node in a replicated state machine (server cluster) can stay in any of the three states, namely, leader, candidate, follower. Evolving data consensus model is the next version but to meet the blockchain requirements fundamentally, we use RAFT.
AIM: Well, if you have built a proprietary blockchain protocol, what incentives are you giving to validators?
Vaideeswaran: Users are our validators. If users are able to send data in a digital format, get everything in real time, and streamline different operations at one place—the use case itself is a big incentive for them to become validators of the protocol. However, this is our short-term plan for this protocol.
In the long term, we plan to take the protocol public, which could then be used for building different softwares on top of it.
AIM: Do you think that you know you can use this blockchain to solve problems in other sectors, maybe e-commerce or some other sector?
Vaideeswaran: Absolutely. So, we will soon open up the protocol as it is getting matured for the public. I think there is more room for innovation in this protocol in real world commerce. We have taken the supply chain as an anchor from a business perspective, but we are agnostic to industry or domains.
On this protocol, developers can build a healthcare workflow so doctors can send the appointment on the network, write the prescription and receive the payment from patients. Similarly, the use case of Param Network can be extended to other sectors.
