OpenDSU: Digital Sovereignty in PharmaLedger

Distributed ledger networks, chiefly those based on blockchain technologies, currently are heralding a next generation of computer systems that aims to suit modern users' demands. Over the recent years, several technologies for blockchains, off-chaining strategies, as well as decentralised and respectively self-sovereign identity systems have shot up so fast that standardisation of the protocols is lagging behind, severely hampering the interoperability of different approaches. Moreover, most of the currently available solutions for distributed ledgers focus on either home users or enterprise use case scenarios, failing to provide integrative solutions addressing the needs of both. Herein we introduce the OpenDSU platform that allows to interoperate generic blockchain technologies, organised - and possibly cascaded in a hierarchical fashion - in domains. To achieve this flexibility, we seamlessly integrated a set of well conceived OpenDSU components to orchestrate off-chain data with granularly resolved and cryptographically secure access levels that are nested with sovereign identities across the different domains. Employing our platform to PharmaLedger, an inter-European network for the standardisation of data handling in the pharmaceutical industry and in healthcare, we demonstrate that OpenDSU can cope with generic demands of heterogeneous use cases in both, performance and handling substantially different business policies. Importantly, whereas available solutions commonly require a pre-defined and fixed set of components, no such vendor lock-in restrictions on the blockchain technology or identity system exist in OpenDSU, making systems built on it flexibly adaptable to new standards evolving in the future.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure