How is Apache Kafka® relevant to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency? Fotios Filacouris (Staff Solutions Engineer, Confluent) has been working with Kafka for close to five years, primarily designing architectural solutions for financial services, he also has expertise in the blockchain. In this episode, he joins Kris to discuss how blockchain and Kafka are complementary, and he also highlights some of the use cases he has seen emerging that use Kafka in conjunction with traditional, distributed ledger technology (DLT) as well as blockchain technologies.
According to Fotios, Kafka and the notion of blockchain share many traits, such as immutability, replication, distribution, and the decoupling of applications. This complementary relationship means that they can function well together if you are looking to extend the functionality of a given DLT through sidechain or off-chain activities, such as analytics, integrations with traditional enterprise systems, or even the integration of certain chains and ledgers.
Based on Fotios’ observations, Kafka has become an essential piece of the puzzle in many blockchain-related use cases, including settlement, logging, analytics and risk, and volatility calculations. For example, a bitcoin trading application may use Kafka Streams to provide analytics on top of the price action of various crypto assets. Fotios has also seen use cases where a crypto platform leverages Kafka as its infrastructure layer for real-time logging and analytics.