Specifying Blockchain-based Resource-Exchange Systems by Business-Level Users Using a Generic Easy-To-Use Framework

Blockchain technology has been rapidly emerging in the past years. The notion of decentralization, enabling ecosystems that provide true ownership of resources without requiring a trusted third party, is gaining interest and is applied in use cases daily. Such use cases vary from simple currency-exchange applications to complex smart contract applications. Designing, building, and deploying blockchain-based applications mostly requires software developers. This introduces a technological burden for organizations who would like to benefit from such systems in their own use case(s) but lack time, financial means, or qualified people. To overcome this burden, we developed a software framework allowing an easy and quick setup of blockchain-based systems for use cases dealing with the exchange of resources. To set up such a system, an easy- to-use user interface is provided that allows business-level people to give the specifications of the system without the need for technical software-, blockchain- or smart contract knowledge. From these specifications an implementation is generated. In this paper, we present the architecture of the framework and discuss the principles used, and the user interface developed for specifying such use cases.