The Sphere is using blockchain to tackle commercial inefficiencies, operational challenges and financial threats across the telecom industry.
Dublin-based The Sphere has spent the past two years honing the creation of a global ecosystem that was designed to help carriers, enterprises and large retailers keep track of their transactions by offering secure interconnections.
Yariv Trabelsi, CTO, said his company has utilized its own blockchain technology to create a globally distributed network architecture that's enabled via connections with cloud providers such as Oracle, Google, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google.
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The Sphere’s live exchange platform, which serves as the core of the ecosystem, allows carriers to instantly offer, purchase and resell services in a secure and dynamic market thanks to its blockchain technology and fraud management system.
"Usually, when you discuss a specific telecom company they have problems getting solutions to market," Trabelsi said. "It can take a long time. With The Sphere we believe that by creating an interactive market telecoms can interact with their customers and each other in real time to increase their revenues.
"For example, in today's world it can take a few days to get a contract signed, but with The Sphere it can take a matter of minutes. This not only improves time to market but also means carriers don't have to go through the rigors of making the connections themselves."
Carriers of all sizes can use The Sphere for multiparty trading, routing and financial settlements. The blockchain technology also allows the users to maintain the integrity of their transactions by tracking them in order to detect possible fraudulent actions or misuse of data.
Trabelsi said that The Sphere would launch with "friendlies" over the next few weeks. The company has raised $6 million to date from private European investors, and while Trabelsi said that was enough for the short term he didn't rule out another round of investment at a later date.
While physical interconnection and collocation buildings have served the telecom industry for some time, the cloud approach is relatively new. Trabelsi said that other companies were offering bits and pieces of what The Sphere does, but not the whole ecosystem.
In other blockchain-related news, Endgadget reported that Facebook was looking at how it could implement blockchain across its products. There was no word on whether Facebook would employ blockchain for payments.