Sage Management is a company that operates in the telecom industry and built a blockchain solution to optimize telecom companies’ operations functions, with a focus on cost savings, efficiency, privacy and scalability. The company uses Ethereum and Linea’s zkEVM. Sage’s use of Ethereum originated early 2023 when the company took part of a project called the Project Wolf in Town in collaboration with the MEF (a global industry association of network, cloud, and technology providers) Wolf Town Accelerator. The platform started as a way to automate transfer of SLA Credits, a type of compensation given to consumers, and Sage has now redefined the scope of the platform to focus on specific telecom billing events, such as orders and trouble tickets.
But what is wrong with the telecom industry?
70% of wholesale invoices between carriers have inaccuracies, and 20% of all orders issued also have errors. This results in $50-100 million in active disputes. And due to the nature of the situation, it is very hard to know exactly what happened and who is liable for what. Both buyers and sellers lose a lot of time in these disputed invoices which leads to shared loss, and thus to dissatisfaction. In other words, everybody loses.
Processes are outdated and very inefficient: if a circuit breaks down, people have to manually investigate, and even look at old invoices or ask technicians to recall events that happened a long time ago. There is clearly a need for enhanced processes. This is where blockchain fits in. But due to the nature of the operations, not everything can be shared and some data must remain private, let’s see how Sage architected its solution to resolve this.
Sage’s solution and how they used blockchain to solve the issues
As explained above, Sage’s use of Ethereum originated with the MEF’s Project Wolf Town for Service Level Agreement (SLA) automation, but they are now also experimenting the streamlining of order and billing processes with the Project Soft Owl. The company is very enthusiastic about the use of Ethereum as “Smart contracts with real-time mutual endorsement can eliminate disputes and free up valuable resources for both parties”. Although the public aspect of Ethereum is very valuable, they were also concerned with privacy issues. That is why they also decided to use the Layer-2 Linea which permits to build enterprise-grade zkEVM solution on top of Ethereum. The combination allows them to have a secure blockchain solution where they can keep proprietary data private. In other words, they have the best of both worlds with Linea’s zkEVM scalability and Ethereum’s security.
With the solution they built, they are able to execute private transactions while showing an immutable proof of the transaction on a public blockchain.
Building on the original project from the Project Wolf Town, the solution is now a wholesale carrier SaaS platform that aims to facilitate mutual endorsements on public Ethereum for specific telecom billing events, such as orders and trouble tickets. The new platform will be a DApp on Ethereum Mainnet, set to launch in early 2024.
As for SLA Credits automation, Sage mentions that in Latam these are often overdue due to data constraints and that the Sage’s DApp could really make the whole process quicker, more accurate and more trustworthy.
Below is a diagram illustrating the solution:
