Modern Treasury reposted this
AWS announced that they’re sunsetting QLDB (Quantum Ledger Database) next year. I’m sad to see this cool piece of technology go. Since we also sell a (very different) product with the word “ledger", I’ve followed QLDB for years and have some thoughts on what led to this. It’s not like Amazon to sunset an active product that companies have been using for years (!) To understand why they did it, we have to go back to 2019. Immutable distributed ledgers using cryptographic hashes were all the rage. Everybody was trying to apply it everywhere. In the midst of this, AWS released QLDB - a fully managed, cryptographically verifiable document database. It wasn’t entirely clear what it should be used for, but it was cool. Engineers found it intriguing. If you were an engineer, you could build a product on one of the boring old SQL databases that AWS provided, or you could use the one that used cryptographic hashes. Unfortunately, it seems like AWS never got past this murkiness on where QLDB could be most useful. They’ve powered some fascinating use cases like tracking vehicle licensing for the UK’s Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency or tracking price changes for revenue optimization at Zilliant. But for most companies/use cases, it turns out that it’s overkill to have a database that creates a cryptographic hash every time you insert a record. The thing is, immutability is useful in certain contexts, like financial ledgering. You shouldn’t be able to overwrite payment records. But if you’re ledgering payments, you also need other features like double-entry accounting, performant balances, and operational dashboards. That’s the narrower problem Modern Treasury decided to focus on, and it let us get more specific about our user than QLDB did. If any QLDB users are looking for an out-of-the-box financial ledger - one that has all the features you need to track money movements - reach out to us.