Learning Blockchain with ServiceNow and Hedera Hashgraph #2

Creating Hedera Accounts with the Now Platform

Original LI post: https://lkdin.io/3nHI

Let’s continue the journey in discovering blockchain capabilities & patterns using Hedera as the ledger (DLT) and ServiceNow as our low-code business application platform.

ServiceNow & Hedera represent the perfect environment to learn about blockchain for business.

Let’s discuss another foundational concept: how you can c̳r̳e̳a̳t̳e̳ ̳n̳e̳w̳ ̳a̳c̳c̳o̳u̳n̳t̳s̳.

Accounts are foundational in Hedera. They can represent people, organizations, and devices.

Accounts are 𝐩𝐬𝐞𝐮𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐲𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐬, but they can be KYC’d to real identities. They do not reveal the owner’s identity per se. This is not so different from a username.

Instead of a password, cryptographic keys control accounts. In this post, we will focus on 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒆-𝒌𝒆𝒚 𝒂𝒄𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕𝒔. We will see in another post that more sophisticated key combinations called 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 can control accounts.

As keys are permissioned to ServiceNow users, they become the controller of the account.

Other blockchains don’t necessarily have the concept of account. For example, in Ethereum, the closest idea (I believe) is smart contract wallets.

The AccountCreate transactions declare the account to the ledger, and record the controlling public key.

Like many other key objects in Hedera, accounts are expressed as shard.realm.account (e.g. 0.0.12345). While SHARDS and REALMS are not yet active (you will always see 0.0…) they’re a key component regarding network architecture & scalability.

There are some essential flags in account creation, like the 𝘮𝘢𝘹_𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤_𝘵𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯_𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (you must associate a token to an account before being able to own it) and the 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳_𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦_𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘥 (if this is true, the account receiving a token must sign the transaction together with the sender)

In the v̳i̳d̳e̳o̳, you can see the creation of two accounts, a1 and a2, corresponding to keys, k1 and k2, already created in the first video. The same ServiceNow users control both keys. In the video, you will see the interplay between instance data (in ServiceNow DB) and DLT data (on-chain, visualized through r̳e̳m̳o̳t̳e̳ ̳t̳a̳b̳l̳e̳s̳ 🙌)

Original LinkedIn post: https://lkdin.io/3nH7