Frequently Asked Questions
Have questions about Sky Republic?
Here are the answers to the most common ones we get:
What is Sky Republic, zPaaS, zContract, and zApp?
Sky Republic is a multi-enterprise collaboration network with three game-changing capabilities:
- zero-trust contracts, or zContracts
Distributed services that govern and replicate/mediate data, documents, and transactions for participating enterprises.
- zero-trust apps, or zApps
These apps integrate and verify zContract executions, including the origin, authenticity, and validity of their data.
- zero-trust app Platform as a Service, or zPaaS
A platform for building and running zero-trust contracts and apps within permissioned Sky Republic Network communities.
Is the zero-trust capability of zPaaS built on NIST-compliant cryptography?
zPaaS enables participants to verify the origin, integrity, currentness, and consistency of data received – right out of the box.
It leverages NIST-compliant cryptography, which is also used to permission access to the network, secure the immutability of digital signatures, and verify the identity of counterparts.
Is Sky Republic a blockchain network?
No. There is no coin, gas, miners, anonymity, or decentralized governance.
The Sky Republic Network is a business network where users can buy or build apps and create or join permissioned communities to use them. It provides confidentiality, transaction finality, and horizontal scalability.
Is there any limitation in terms of data format, size, latency, or throughput?
A zContract manages up to 128TB of relational data, which are replicated asynchronously on the nodes where participating zApps run. Control towers and AI engines can then be fed with actionable, fresh, and complex structured data. In terms of documents, petabytes of files can be handled by a zApp or zContract. All formats are supported, including XML, JSON, text, binary, images, etc.
Sky Republic storage and compute capacity scales horizontally and has virtually no limit. zContracts process events and provide results in couple seconds’ maximum latency, zApp to zApp. Network throughput keeps growing linearly as zContracts are deployed.
Is Sky Republic zPaaS an iPaaS?
No, it’s main purpose is to govern multi-enterprise data for business communities, especially supply chains. But you can create APIs and connectors to integrate your ERP and other enterprise applications.
What are the main use cases of zPaaS?
zContracts govern data and processes for participating enterprises that can join and leave the service over time. The main use cases are:
- Digital supplier passport: supplier data sharing with client tiers for ESG reporting, scope 3 analysis, or other purposes
- Digital product passport: tokenization of serialized assets
- Digital process passport: synchronization of multi-enterprise processes, such as purchase orders, shipments, etc.
A zContract maintains consensus on its data among participants via a dedicated distributed ledger. For example, a carrier joining a shipment zContract or a manufacturer joining a product passport zContract can independently verify the execution and data processed by the related zContract from the time the zContract was started.
zContracts participants are guaranteed to see the same data in their zApp, which enables better business synchronization, more efficient disruption detection and mitigation, improved SLA compliance, and reduced friction.
Can zPaaS be used to implement EDI?
Yes, it can process any message flow you currently use AS IS, based on any EDI standard.
EDI solutions can be extended with new events to automate processes end-to-end, exchange documents, or integrate IoT feeds. With zPaaS, you can give visibility into business processes to upstream or downstream participants and reduce paperwork, manual tasks, disruptions, and friction.
Is Sky Republic open source?
No, but it’s an open platform with APIs that clients and third parties (ISVs) can use to develop zContracts and zApps, while retaining ownership of their intellectual property.
Is Sky Republic Passport an ESG software?
No, but Passport enables the integration of heterogenous ESG software across a supply chain network via a shared, multi-standard metadata repository. Passport allows suppliers to load data and documents like PCF/LCAs in a digital supplier passport, so their clients can access them on demand, track changes, and automate ESG questionnaires.
What is the best way to conduct a proof of concept with Sky Republic?
If you’re interested in Passport zApp, it only takes a couple of hours to try it out for free.
If you want to build a zApp with zPaaS, trying Passport is a good first step before getting a sandbox and starting a prototype.
