Off the Chain: Scaling Blockchain Data With Kafka With Jan Svoboda and Alex Stuart | Current 2022 Despite the plentiful hype, blockchain technology hasn't solved world hunger (yet). Nor has it dealt with the issues of low data throughput, deployment complexity and high costs. We believe that bringing in another immutable distributed event store in the form of Apache Kafka presents an opportunity to leverage the benefits of both systems to create a more scalable and accessible solution. This session will explain how slow data on the blockchain can be joined together with fast data in Kafka and published out to other systems. Jan and Alex (two of Confluent’s resident crypto fans) will walk through a prototype of a distributed blockchain application that will help with electric car battery management. Car battery identity data will be stored on a blockchain whereas the actual charge state data will be streamed to Kafka as part of the electric car charging process. Bringing the data together will allow us to have an improved and secure battery lifecycle management. This session is targeted for anyone who is interested in learning about blockchain technology, event streaming, and interoperability of blockchain data with a wider business. Demo application code will be available to participants.

1. Off the Chain
Enriching blockchain data with real time event streaming

2. GM Current 22
Alex Stuart
Confluent Advisory Solutions Engineer, UK
Previously: Splunk, Experian
Terrible Crypto Investor, slightly better
blockchain community builder
Jan Svoboda
Confluent Senior Solutions Engineer, DE
Previously: Pivotal, IBM, HPE
Built the Solidity Stuff

3. What are we covering today
3
1. The State of Blockchain
3. Building with Blockchains and Kafka
2. Why Blockchain vs Kafka?
4. What we Built
5. Learnings + Q&A

4. Blockchain in 2022
4
$8.3B Market Opportunity, 34% CAGR
EU and US Legislation on digital assets
$17.5 B of Project and VC Funding in 2022
“The Merge”, September 15th
2022

5. A tale of two logs

6. A tale of two logs
“The humble log is an
abstraction that lies at the
heart of many systems,
from NoSQL databases to
cryptocurrencies.”
-Jay Kreps, I ❤ Logs
Immutable
Distributed
Highly Available
Real time

7. So where do they differ?
7
Blockchains
• Increase the data security
Tamper “proof”, vastly more
difficult to change
• Truly distributed
Cross organizations, borders,
business
• Encrypted Payloads
Apache Kafka
• Ease of Integration
• High Volume processing of data
Millions of messages a second
• Use case flexibility
• Scalability

8. How does this drive differences in our architectural
design?
8
Immutability Trust Real Scale Real Time

9. Hands On Demo
9

10. Understanding the Build - Use Cases
10
id address
origin_country string
year_built unit
cycles unit
blocked bool
Ethereum Smart Contract
Charging Station Master Data
Battery Charging
Transactions
Battery Status
Charging Analytics Data
Get Battery Info
Increase Battery Cycles
Battery Production
Battery Owner
id address
origin_country string
year_built unit
cycles unit
blocked bool
id address
origin_country string
year_built unit
cycles unit
blocked bool
Create Battery Info
Lock Battery

11. Understanding the Build - Architecture

13. Why We Chose…
13
Solidity KSQLDB Kafka
Who owns the data?
Who can see the data?
Who can change against my
details?
What questions do we need to
ask the streams?
How easily can we abstract
away complexity for building a
prototype?
How can ingesting real time
data be accelerated?
What does the fan-out of our
data look like?

14. Learnings
14

15. Any Questions? Please Ask!
Alex Stuart
astuart@confluent.io
ajfstuart
Jan Svoboda
jsvoboda@confluent.io