Beckn is a universal resource discovery and transaction protocol that enables the leap to open, decentralized, and interoperable peer-to-peer networks. Beckn is a great choice when you want to build projects and products integrated various different providers into a singular discovery platform. At it’s core Beckn has three main network participant entities - Beckn Gateway (BG), Beckn Application Platform (BAP) and Beckn Provider Platform (BPP). In very simplistic and partially right terms these could be thought of simply as a network level proxy or gateway server connecting a client side application (BAP) to a server side application (BPP). I will write a more detailed blog around Beckn sometime later, till then this much information is enough to understand more about the projects I have worked on with Beckn.
My first ever production project that I worked on was the loan discovery platform for Odisha Government’s SAFAL Portal. The problem statement was one click enablement of credit for farmers from various credit providers since the previous process for getting credit was very cumbersome and unapproachable for the technologically challenged farmers. We employed Beckn to allow for this by writing an adaptation of the specification for credit domain and then developing a system where multiple banks could be onboarded without much overhead of development on their pre-existing systems by developing simple adapters which could just transform the payloads from the bank’s backend specifiation to Beckn specification and vice-versa. The entire codebase is open sourced in the Konnect Odisha github organisation. The stack features a DEPA based consent manager to store the user’s consent for what information they want to share with the credit providers and what information they don’t.
In the system the safal portal acted as a BAP and the credit providers acted as the BPPs all of which could be accessed on the platform and the entire process and stage of the application could be tracked from there to enable easy and seamless integration making the process of seeking credit a lot more simpler for the farmers.
The second instance was when we joined the Beckn community to enable Open network for learning and livelihood transactions (ONEST) which is the adaptation of Beckn for the skilling and education domain. As a part of the community we helped design and shape the ONEST specification and also helped with a reference implementation for the initial v1.1 of the specification which was launched and used in for the Skillathon organised by FIDE to introduce ONEST with the world when it was in it’s early stages of development in Feb’23. ONEST was known as Decentralised Skilling and Education Protocol (DSEP) protocol. The reference implementation can be found at the samagra-development/dsep github.