Nicko Guyer, Software Engineer at Kaleido and Hyperledger FireFly maintainer, Author at Hyperledger Foundation

Sep 28

Introducing Hyperledger FireFly, a Multi-Party System for Enterprise Data Flows

By Nicko Guyer, Software Engineer at Kaleido and Hyperledger FireFly maintainer Blog, Hyperledger Firefly

We are very excited to announce the newest Hyperledger project, Hyperledger FireFly. Contributed by Kaleido to Hyperledger Labs in June 2021, FireFly has an active and growing open source community. FireFly has now been promoted to an official Hyperledger project, and has moved into Incubation status.

What Is Hyperledger FireFly?

Hyperledger FireFly is a multi-party system for enterprise data flows. It provides a purpose-built system upon which to build decentralized blockchain applications. It solves for the layers of complexity that sit between the low level blockchain and high level business processes and user interfaces. FireFly enables developers to build blockchain apps for enterprises significantly faster by allowing them to focus on business logic instead of commodity infrastructure foundations.

When businesses are building decentralized blockchain applications, the blockchain is usually considered the most important part. But many times, when these applications are designed to work with multiple parties, companies realize that the blockchain infrastructure is just a small percentage of the overall solution needed for a robust enterprise grade, multi-party system.

Usually, far more effort goes into building out functionality that isn’t specific to a blockchain protocol, but is necessary to make the multi-party system work. Each member needs to integrate the blockchain system with their legacy systems. The multi-party system must also support off-chain activities between member organizations that aren’t suited to the blockchain, like sharing sensitive files or sending private messages.

Building out these plumbing layers becomes a major source of friction for many projects, leading to high costs and long development cycles, ultimately preventing many apps from ever getting into production.

FireFly is designed to solve this problem. It is an open source software project that creates a standardized way to build a multi-party system powered by blockchain. It has an easy-to-use REST API that provides the building blocks of any blockchain app such as pinning data and sending public or private messages and files.

FireFly also supports custom smart contracts and managing tokens, both fungible and non-fungible. It provides a robust event system with WebSocket or webhook interfaces.

The architecture is completely modular and “pluggable” meaning nearly any part of the system can be swapped out for a different implementation; everything from the database to the blockchain itself. As the open source community around FireFly continues to grow, we’re excited to see what new plugins will be created for integration with other services.

The Journey Through Labs

Hyperledger Labs made sense as a good place for FireFly to start as it was a brand new open source project. Since entering Labs in June, many major new features have been added, including support for Hyperledger Fabric in addition to Hyperledger Besu. A major part of the time in Labs was a focus on building the open source community around FireFly. The idea of FireFly has really resonated with people, and every week more and more developers are joining the community to build apps on FireFly (such as Hyperledger’s Giving Chain Project), to contribute to the project for Mainnet, Defi, and other use financial services cases, and to standardize decentralized app building across members of major enterprise consortia.

What’s Next For Hyperledger FireFly?

Now that FireFly is a Hyperledger project, we will continue adding powerful new features to the project and growing the welcoming developer community, but now with the added benefit of more visibility within the Hyperledger community. We are making rapid progress toward an official v1.0 release, which will include several highly anticipated features including support for tokens and a unified API for interacting with custom smart contracts.

How Can I Get Involved?

We welcome more contributors to get involved in the project! There are lots of places to get involved, across a wide variety of skill sets. It’s easy to get the source code on GitHub and get started today! To get in touch with the maintainers and other developers working on FireFly, feel free to join our channel on Rocket Chat or our mailing list. We would also love for you to join our open community calls! For the most up to date schedule, as well as joining information, please check our public calendar.

We’re excited to be on this journey and to have the Hyperledger community at work accelerating the development of FireFly. We hope you’ll join us in the journey as well!

Aug 25

Love0

The Giving Chain: Blockchain Powering Generosity

By MONA RASSOULI Blog

A Hyperledger social impact project under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation

Blockchain technology is a strong pillar for driving supply chains for both enterprise and nonprofit entities. For nonprofits, the difference is as critical as ensuring vital aid is delivered to an entire region or group of individuals in need. The Giving Chain, comprising three different social impact projects, is seeking to aid humanitarian crises and regional emergencies.

Through distributed ledger technology, the model becomes decentralized, allowing for all parties to be able to track the donations live in a secure, trusted, and verifiable manner. The immutability of transactions affords the entire network a tamper-proof assurance, which supplies a greater sense of ease and dignity to the nonprofit assistance schema.

In this piece, the Giving Chain would like to convey the purpose and mission statement of the project. If this cause speaks to the reader, we kindly ask for assistance in the form of donations to our GoFundMe initiative and help spreading the word.

The Giving Chain is the recipient of a Government Blockchain Association Award for Social Impact in 2020 and an honorary mention at the Big Apps Blockchain challenge.

The Giving Chain project initiatives are:

Project Princeton
Project Uttarakhand
Project Women

Each is highlighted in its own respective section below:

Project Princeton

This project is based in the tri-state area of the United States. Donations from food drives and surplus produce from Jersey farmers will be distributed to local food banks. The aim is to combat hunger locally for families and individuals in need. This urgency has been amplified due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative follows the local charity giving model and has been in effect since 2019.

Project Uttarakhand

Localized to the Uttarakhand area of India, this project’s purpose is to aid local farmers who have been impacted by flooding. For farmers in this region, donations are vital as their sole livelihood has suffered.

Project Women

A women’s crisis is a humanitarian crisis. Women in India across many regions are in dire need of sanitary products. Ongoing efforts have been made in the past, but distributed ledger technology increases the assurance of women receiving the help that they need.

Technical Stack

Fundamentally the aim of the project is to transact the proof of ownership of the donations between each entity in the network. The party’s claim on the donation is verified through an NFT digital twin to declare that the resources are in their possession at that point in time.

The first two projects are donor driven, while Project Women is a recipient-driven model.

The projects are utilizing the power of Hyperledger to allow broadcasting of the transaction to the nodes in the network. Nodes may have integrations with other enterprise technology. Each node in the decentralized network will have its own identity and will be representative of a specific role. Roles in the model include donors, recipients, drivers, and NGOs at present. If you are interested in building out this technology, please go here.

Compatibility and integration research is underway for multiple Hyperledger projects. They will be explored and possibly integrated in phases as the codebase and functionality develops.

Aug 18

Love0

A Message on Why Localization Matters from the New Hyperledger Japan Chapter

By Noriaki Fukuyasu Blog, Regional Chapter

Recently, we added another regional chapter of the Hyperledger community launched by Japanese community participants. Normally, open source projects emphasize the importance of “upstream” or “mainline” contributions so as to not “fork” the codes and communication.

However, with the addition of the new Hyperledger Japan Chapter, Hyperledger has now launched six regional chapters. Many community members are gathering around the regional chapters to exchange thoughts and ideas rather than gathering around the mainline mailing lists. Some people might see this as a “fork.”

But the regional chapters play very important roles in helping Hyperledger prosper all around the globe.

“Language” is a huge barrier – how can we be more inclusive to non-English speakers?

Needless to say, the unofficial official language of open source projects, including Hyperledger, is English. To participate in the upstream development, people are expected to be capable of communicating in English. As English is the standard language platform to communicate among the people from different countries and cultures regardless, this is how it should be.

But still this causes issues for non-English speakers to participate in the projects.

First of all, unless the information about the projects (web pages, blogs, news releases, etc.) are translated into the local languages, the projects remain “unknown” in the region. Normally, non-native English speakers won’t read English content day to day unless they really have to. So the projects won’t be noticed by non-English speaking people in the first place.

Even if the projects are noticed by the non-English speaking audience, the next hurdle is understanding the projects in depth. People may want to dig into such things as:

Technology in detail
Upstream development trends and directions (roadmap)
Existing use cases
Step-by-step guides of how to implement
Troubleshooting

In order for all of this information to become available in a local language, it takes a very solid local community and translation ecosystem. But we tend to face the Columbus Egg issue here because, unless the information is translated, it is extremely hard to grow a solid local community.

Above all, “people” matters most. It is important for the non-English speaking community participants to be able to ask questions to someone who can potentially help in their local language. Reading the technical documents and blogs in local languages are very essential steps to become familiar with the technology, but talking to people can strengthen the confidence in the projects and become a very big motivation to start really using and participating in the projects.

Language issues can only be solved by the regional chapters

So the biggest value of the regional chapters is to solve these problems caused by the language barrier.

At the Hyperledger Japan Chapter, we identified the “Chapter Leaders.” The chapter leaders will get together to evangelize the Hyperledger projects in Japan through events, blogs, etc., so the projects are “noticed” by the Japanese industry.

The chapter leaders are planning to bring more and more useful information about Hyperledger projects to the Japan Chapter wiki, so it will become easier for Hyperledger newbies to find out the information (technologies, use cases, etc.). Ideally, the wiki will grow to a one-stop portal where people can find anything they need.

We’ve opened up the Japanese rocket chat channel as well so people can ask questions and the chapter leaders can answer in Japanese language.

Growing a solid regional open source community is not an easy task. It takes an effort to make it happen, and the Hyperledger Japan Chapter launched to take on the challenge.

All blockchain and Hyperledger enthusiasts in Japan, please come join Hyperledger Japan Chapter! We will welcome you all!

Find us here:

Wiki: Hyperledger Japan Chapter
Rocketchat: Japanese
Meetups: Hyperledger Tokyo Meetup
Facebook: Linux Foundation Japan
Twitter: Linux Foundation Japan

「Hyperledger Japan Chapter へのご参加お待ちしてます！」

Cover image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay

Jul 29

Love2

Enterprises Can No Longer Take Shortcuts with Climate and Social Impact, and Distributed Ledgers Provide Proven Accelerators for Change

By Anthony Day, Blockchain Partner, IBM Blog, Climate, Hyperledger Fabric, Supply Chain

One of the few benefits we have seen emerge from the recent COVID-19 pandemic is an amplification of focus and desire for accountability around corporate and government sustainability, or “ESG” (Environmental, Social and Governance) metrics.

However, sustainability must move beyond commitments and transition into action. Sustainable action. Sustainable from process, technology and commercial standpoints; and helping those in a position of power (who have not traditionally been used to prioritising investments based on ESG metrics) to make difficult choices to drive action.

Furthermore, as we look at “earth system” trends like CO2 emissions, surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss and many others we see exponential increases in harm and damage over recent years. In other words, acceleration.

Speaking of action, if we are to make any dent in these exponential trends, we need to aim for a more profound impact than incremental improvements to individual corporate metrics such as a10% reduction in plastic packaging, 15% increase in use of recycled materials or move to hybrid vehicle fleets. Aiming higher and working together across entire value chains is key and so is creating systems that enable collaboration, tracking, reporting and remuneration. The latter is important as businesses must remain commercially sustainable, or we will not see participation and investment amongst small and medium-sized enterprises..

Despite what some vendors say , there is no “single app” that addresses the wide spectrum of sustainability requirements as the use cases are varied and more will emerge.

Many corporations are embarking on internal “data gathering” exercises to assess their Scope 1 emissions (direct emissions from owned or controlled sources) so they can have a fact base from which to then take action in a couple of years. Often they are quietly hoping Scope 3 emissions (other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain) will go away. In my opinion, this approach is far from the immediate and meaningful “action” needed to drive change.

At the core, we need to enable more connected supply chains from which we can develop and co-create applications that share, automate, track and integrate with a multitude of different processes and IT systems.

Blockchain and distributed ledgers have proven themselves to be appropriate architectures for these multi-party platforms as they bring together identity, standards, automation of activity, aggregation of data, scalability, transparency and, importantly, incentivisation. That’s a lot more than just a “fancy data store.”

We can re-use or take inspiration from existing multi-party systems that are already addressing known climate and social issues, work together as networks of companies to have greater impact. And we can start today, not in two years’ time when we’ve completed our internal data audit.

Here are some examples of where distributed ledgers, and Hyperledger Fabric in particular, are already being used to address ESG issues that are cross-industry, cross-border and can be used as impact accelerators.

Waste Reduction – Nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted each year (source: United Nations): IBM Food Trust originated as a platform for managing food safety, but the data stored on the platform across farmers, transport companies, manufacturers and retailers allows for more granular tracking of freshness, dwell time, conditions in storage and transit, which can be used to optimise distribution, reduce waste, and even extend shelf life.
Material Circularity – Production of materials we use every day account for 45% of the CO2 emissions (source: EuroParl): Plastic Bank has created a circular economy platform around collection, processing and sale of “Social Plastic” to large manufacturers, with a focus on empowerment and financial reward for collectors in developing countries. Mitsui and Asahi Kasei have also recently announced development of DLT-based circularity marketplaces to record, track and incentivise their suppliers and customers to increase re-use of plastic and chemical feedstock and provide transparency to regulators where taxation of imported plastics is coming into force.
Social Impact – Almost half of consumption-related emissions are generated by just 10% of people globally (source: Project Drawdown): Farmer Connect has its origins in traceability of commodities such as coffee and cocoa and provision of self-sovereign identity applications for farmers. Interestingly, Farmer Connect is using its “first mile” digitisation expertise to bring customers (and brands) closer to social impact projects in developing countries and enable crowdfunding of local projects.
Renewable Energy Consumption – Share of renewables in global electricity generation was 29% in 2020 (source: IEA): Renewables present an opportunity for low-cost, abundant energy but have challenges in scaling, particularly in balancing supply and demand. Equigy is a multi-country “crowd balancing” platform comprising energy companies in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. Equigy uses blockchain technology to access, via aggregators, new sources of electricity from the owners of consumer-based devices and is working towards incorporating use of decentralised storage with private or commercial vehicles and batteries.
Carbon Capture – In practice, some sectors will simply not be able to achieve net-zero emissions without carbon capture (source: IEA): Newlight Technologies recently launched a range of “regenerative, carbon-negative” fashion products made from air-captured carbon, and with the origin of the carbon capture and authenticity of individual products stored and traceable on a distributed ledger. While manufacture of sunglasses is not analogous to all sectors, the ability to track, certify and share material properties in increasingly regulated supply chains is becoming a critical core competence and can be a further step towards scaling voluntary carbon markets.

The important factor here is not that blockchain applied to these domains solved a problem but rather that these climate and social issues are multi-party problems that require entities, activities and processes to be supported by technology to drive and sustain change.

Hopefully, in this article we have demonstrated that the problems are clear, real and addressable; that multi-party collaboration platforms are feasible to implement; and that there are technology accelerators available to enterprises and governments that are proven and scalable. So there should be no further cause for inaction…

Cover image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Jul 28

Love1

Learning Materials and Development Working Group Mentorship Project: “Global Scouting for DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities”

By Alfonso Govela and Amit Chaudhari Blog, Hyperledger Mentorship Program, Working Group

Learning about blockchain and DLT is difficult. Overwhelming amounts of unstructured information lies scattered across the web. Plenty of efforts are wasted in isolated searches for golden nuggets. However, with proper guidance and cooperation, we can hone our skills faster and build a collective body of knowledge.

What and where to learn? Where to gather dispersed data? What structure to add to understand the content? How to expose it for public benefit? What learning paths to follow? How to align our skills with labor markets? How to support our entrepreneurial spirit? At what cost? Is financing available and inclusive? Are there scholarships?

Mass collaboration can answer these questions faster. Paraphrasing Linus Law, given enough eyes, the ocean of educational opportunities is shallow.

We want to engage and energize an active community of learners who are self-selected by their interest to understand the field and assisted by a communication mechanism and an open-source toolkit. Their collective intelligence can explore, gather, understand, structure, and share previously unorganized data, fueled by their satisfaction to contribute and build a reputation as knowledge miners.

Work is underway for this Learning Initiative at our 2021 Mentorship Program Global Scouting of DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities.

Timeline

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We envision five core activities that shall repeat in iterative cycles:

– Community to mine knowledge.

– Surveys to gather human feedback.

– Automation to enumerate digital resources.

– Ontology and Taxonomy for cognitive search.

– Knowledge Graph for navigating the taxonomy.

At the end of this mentorship, we will have the first version of our Global Directory, a small but geographically extended working community, a basic set of tools to support collaboration, a knowledge graph to navigate the taxonomy, and a final report.

Our Call to Action starts with your answer to our survey, which is available in 10 languages. It will gather your initial feedback to get the cycles going.

Thank you.

Jul 26

Love1

How innovative supply chain solutions can increase blockchain adoption

By Naresh Jain, Co-founder/COO, Snapper Future Tech Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Supply Chain

Challenges in Supply Chain

Supply chain processes are complex and involve many players, heavy documentation and large data sets. Businesses across supply chains work in silos and communication between them is largely through email or phone calls causing issues related to efficiency and costs, data availability and redundancy, transparency and reconciliation, and fraud and trust.

Diagram

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Blockchain Use Cases in Supply Chain

With the advent of blockchain technology, CEOs and CIOs have paid increasing attention to mitigating industry challenges through technology adoption. Supply chain focus area are

Track and trace of assets through supply chain
Provenance to find origin or authenticity of products
Circular economy to reduce carbon footprint by secondary use or recycling products
Customer engagement through loyalty programs using tokenization
Financial transactions through crypto tokens and smart contracts
Automation by capturing and recording data of physical movements using IoT or from different sources.

Blockchain Success Stories in Supply Chain

There are various case studies and success stories that have proved the potential impact of blockchain technology across a number of supply chain use cases:

Mumbai Transport implemented TradeLens to boost efficiency and cut costs

~50% improved communication efficiency of documents like commercial invoices, bills of lading
Lower transport and logistics costs
Shorter lead time and less frequent delays

Walmart brought transparency to food supply chain

Time needed to trace their provenance went from 7 days to… 2.2 seconds!

Chainyard and IBM reduced new vendor risk and drastically cut onboarding

Vendor onboarding cycle time cut from 60 days to 3 days
For buyers: 50% less cost to verify and maintain a supplier’s information
For sellers: much faster time to first sale

Honeywell Aerospace built an online parts marketplace

$4 million in sales in less than a year
Purchase time reduced from days to minutes
Future boost to anti-counterfeit measures

DLTLabs and Walmart eliminated the root problems that caused invoice disputes

Reduction of invoice disputes from 70% to 1.5%
The error threshold for each transaction went from $10 per invoice to $0 per invoice.
Timeline to approve carrier invoices from 6-8 weeks, but often extended over many months, went to less than one week.

Mindtree reinvented its loyalty platforms and merchant onboarding

Merchant onboarding time reduction from more than 20 days to one day
Higher visibility to all parties in the transactions
Eases merchant renewal processes
Standardized AML & KYC processes
Increased cost savings due to automation

Siam Cement Gp saw procure to pay process time cut by 50% and cost reduced to 70%

Blockchain Frameworks in Supply Chain

Most of the supply chain projects are implemented using Hyperledger frameworks, especially Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation hosted by Hyperledger, which is part of the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric is a secure and scalable open-source distributed ledger platform developed with permissions and privacy as its core tenets. Unlike permissionless, distributed blockchains, Hyperledger Fabric leverages a modular architecture that provides enterprises plug-and-play solutions for private transactions and confidential contracts within a network of multiple vendors. This allows an organization to bring together all the stakeholders within its multi-partner ecosystem under one architecture to automate and implement universal workflows across the network.

Hyperledger Fabric is a mature framework that is well suited to deliver low latency, high throughput, and fast send rates along with privacy controls needed for supply chain solutions.

Current State of Blockchain Adoption in Supply Chain

Blockchain benefits are quite visible in the above mentioned success stories. That is why there are many initiatives going on for supply chain-related implementations of blockchain across industries. But it is taking time for these projects to go into production. According to Gartner, “80% of Supply Chain Blockchain Initiatives Will Remain at a Pilot Stage Through 2022.”

Snapper has been working with customers across industries for supply chain solutions. We follow a robust process-of-implementation approach to blockchain, and use a design thinking process to identify the right use cases and the benefits the customer would get. We realized that the customers are very enthusiastic about the use of technology as part of their digital transformation. However, the understanding level of the technology is very limited for most of the customers before engaging with us. Through our design thinking process, customers get to have a good understanding of how blockchain works, what are the benefits and the implementation challenges. One of the major challenges supply chain leaders realize is that building an ecosystem/consortium of stakeholders is a requirement for a blockchain network. As developing an ecosystem is a difficult task and involves high risk, customers are cautious about investing in such solutions and thus delay the decision to implement blockchain solutions. They are in a dilemma whether to take a lead in creating the network or be part of the existing network. Also there are only limited options available for an organization to join an existing blockchain network for their industry. Customers want to see more and more success stories to validate their decisions.

What is Needed For Faster Adoption of Blockchain Technology

Implementation of blockchain technology not only helps organizations achieve digitalization goals but also creates opportunities for new business models. An organization has to decide whether it wants to grab this opportunity of taking the lead in creating a new consortium, driving new business models and increasing efficiency by adopting blockchain now, or wait for the technology to mature and be a follower.

Only large-scale enterprises can influence implementation of complex supply chain solutions. It is very difficult for medium and small-scale enterprises to create a blockchain-enabled supply chain network.

Faster adoption of blockchain can be achieved through the network effect by inclusion of all sizes of enterprises, faster implementations, cost-effective solutions, more and more success stories and maturity of the technology.

Snapper Future Tech is working on an innovative supply chain traceability solution designed to help the community achieve faster adoption. Snapper’s supply chain solution, SnapChain, is designed to empower an enterprise to create its own network without any major investment or risk. Business networks can be small or big, and can be led by any organization throughout the supply chain. Onboarding a business partner on the network is easy and flexible. This is being achieved by creating a metamodel architecture with configurable modules, transactions types and transaction screens

SnapChain Architecture

SnapChain architecture gives an organization the flexibility to host a node and have its own network of partners with a dedicated ledger using a private channel to maintain data privacy. Each organization has one endorsing, one committing peer and one ordering node. Each transaction is endorsed by Snapper peers and organization peers. Smaller organizations can be part of a common organization maintained by Snapper.

Cover Image Copyright Thai Subsea Services Ltd.

Mar 01

Love0

New Hyperledger Media & Entertainment SIG Launches with Welcome to All Comers

By David MacFadyen, UCLA Blog, Special Interest Group

We would like to extend a very warm welcome to anybody and everybody interested in permissioned blockchains for both media (writ large) and entertainment. The launch of the Hyperledger Media & Entertainment Special Interest Group (ME-SIG) is designed to be maximally inclusive: we would like to the see the widest possible range of engineers, developers, in fact all manner of professionals, together with artists, academics, students, experts, and—of course—amateurs.

Here’s how to navigate our initial resources: following a recent, virtual meet-up in Los Angeles, the Media and Entertainment SIG has started to build a landing page on the HL Wiki where you’ll find links to our:

Mailing list sign-up
Rocket Chat channel (while we ponder the pros and cons of Slack)
Proposed debut project
And other initiatives or aggregated info that will naturally grow over time.

In simple terms, the ME-SIG will be using decentralized, permissioned HL blockchains to discuss and build user-friendly apps that respond to the relative disorder of permissonless environments, where artists’ interests are significantly harder to safeguard.

Following comparative analyses of the technical challenges (and hypothetical solutions) facing filmmakers, musicians, novelists, poets, photojournalists, etc., these DLT apps/dapps will be created for content-creators and their publishers, irrespective of location or socioeconomic status. This implies a focus upon UX/UI concerns over command-line tools, all in the name of access and inclusivity.

The ME-SIG will focus on the application of Hyperledger DLTs to media-specific and entertainment use cases. Such activity will automatically foreground topics such as decentralized metadata, digital distribution, copyright protection, royalty payments, value chains, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), tokenized content, counterfeit reduction, and registered digital ownership. By logical extension, these same themes will lead to real-world scenarios or solutions for cinematic, literary, audiovisual, and photographic publishers, to name but four.

Following the established activities of the Social Impact and Trade Finance SIGs, the TME group can then hope to:

Collaborate with other core Hyperledger working groups and project in the areas of architecture

—performance and scalability identity
—smart contracts
—and integration

Build user-friendly DLT ME applications on Hyperledger, focusing on UX-UI goals over command-line tools alone, thus simplifying the workflow of Hyperledger Fabric—for easier adoption by both artists and arts-related communities
Research different protocols—to build standardization across different parties and projects
Identify related reference architectures (business/integration or technical/infrastructure)
Work with businesses and non-profit or NGO communities alike
Share stories of civic success, failure, opportunity, and challenge
Encourage the equal involvement of both early adopters and student newcomers, looking to examine careers beyond the (barely existent!) academic job market.

So what of an initial project? Here’s where we are keenest to involve colleagues and collaborators from outside the worlds of media and/or entertainment. Our initial proposal notes can be found here. It is increasingly revisited and reworked by members of the SIG. We’ve called it a “Distributed Media Curation Platform (DCP) on Hyperledger Fabric.” Please add to those notes with help, criticism, or constructive abuse! Community input is—and will remain—vital. The more we know about your desires and needs, the more a finished product will be useful for you.

The DCP will curate, document, and fairly manage media assets—eg., music, ebooks, photojournalism, gaming figures, digitized artworks, etc. on the blockchain. It will accurately establish the provenance of an asset (its past) and assure that the asset’s creators or rights holders are properly acknowledged and remunerated in the future. For this reason, the DCP is suitable for museums, galleries, labels, and publishers on one hand, while proving equally helpful to artists or content creators on the other. In both environments, the watchword will remain fairness. The following paragraphs outline a plan to build the DCP in a modular fashion, together with definitions of the relevant and manageable technologies.

Hyperledger Fabric 2.X
Fabtoken
NFT
ISCC
OCCP
vLEI
DAO/DAC
Custom UI and Player (PHP/JS, HTML/CSS).

Early curatorial enterprise on the blockchain was celebrated in 2017 by Consensys’ own Engineer of Societies, Simon de la Rouviere. In his overview of P2P distributed curation markets (DCMs), de la Rouviere quoted Umberto Eco’s equation of curation or list-making with culture itself.

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.

The benefits offered by a blockchain DCP, de la Rouviere claimed, are not only decentralization and related systems of accountability. They also include the “the [cultural] wisdom of a crowd sharing at scale “ and micro-transactions or tokenized payments. Both will be addressed by the ME-SIG..

There are certainly lots of existing content aggregation tools, operating with human or artificial intelligence. Given, however, that DCPs rely on both the filtering of information and an attribution of value to those selected assets, AI is (thus far) less likely to to attribute lasting or accurate cultural worth to any resulting list than a known, human entity within a relatively small and permissioned environment. Culture is a profoundly human and abstract activity, revolving around what many blockchain/DCP scholars like to term a “Schelling (i.e., focal) point” of consideration. Some DCPs that have arisen around such foci are:

Ocean Protocol — AI data pools
Messari — crypto projects
Civil — journalism
MedCredits — doctors
District0x — marketplaces

In all cases, a relatively small and specialized community creates worth in a permissioned or walled environment, within which individuals determine a value-system. We will move along the same lines, so please help to guide our passage—and inform us of your needs in the process. Then we can be sure of building something you will want and use!

Thanks for your attention!

David MacFadyen
Professor, Comparative Literature / Musicology / Digital Humanities, UCLA
https://www.davidmacfadyen.com

Feb 03

Love2

Wecan Comply: How to use the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain for real-time compliance auditing

By Vincent Pignon, Omar El Mansour and Justine Latta Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric

The state of compliance today

Compliance today is hampered by a real lack of coordination between its various players. Indeed, each actor uses its own processes and tools. Some have invested in technological innovation while others continue to use more traditional methods. The situation is such that nothing has yet been really proposed to facilitate compliance exchanges between external asset managers and their custodian banks.

The administrative workload is heavy and is increasing: the list grows daily, with a new regulatory alert in financial services alone issued every seven minutes according to Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence. And it is estimated that 15 to 25% of a company’s revenue is wasted because of poor data quality and management says Experian plc. Indeed, information is, most of the time, structured internally but exchanged externally by mail, email, phone or fax in a very inefficient and unsecured way. For EAMs, onboarding at a custodian bank therefore requires several hours of work: the announcement process carried out at all the custodian banks, which can go up to more than 50 hours, is still very manual today.

In addition, the annual review (partial or complete) of the relationship with the bank is an important process for the bank and requires administrative verification work that can take several months.

Compliance efficiency thanks to blockchain

The administrative burden caused by the duplication of compliance processes will be considerably reduced, thanks to blockchain. It will make it possible to digitize and streamline the management of information, thus avoiding many errors. Bockchain technology will enable independent managers to implement much more reliable, smooth and secure operating procedures.

The Wecan Comply platform makes it possible to digitize and standardise the information exchanged between financial players in order to facilitate and streamline exchanges between banks and independent asset managers in a secure manner. The objective is to enable financial players to pool their resources on non-competitive and non-differentiated subjects in order to improve auditability and, eventually, to automate it. This will not be available immediately, but the Wecan Comply platform will soon be linked to official registers. Managers will thus be able to ensure that their custodian banks have direct access to all kinds of official documents, without having to worry about collecting and processing them. By skipping these verification steps, they will be able to save time while limiting the risk of fraud.

The Blockchain Association for Finance: a unique compliance network

Wecan Comply is an ambitious project aimed at optimizing compliance processes. It is the first blockchain infrastructure addressed to Private Banks, thus significantly opening up the prospects of use cases. Several banks and independent asset managers have already joined this unique network: Pictet Group, Lombard Odier Group, Edmond de Rothschild, REYL Group, Hyposwiss Private Bank Genève SA, Gonet, Banque Cramer, CAPITALIUM Wealth Management, PLEION Gestion de fortune, and Fransad Gestion SA. In order to carry out this project, Wecan Group has created an industry standard that meets the best regulatory requirements set by regulators. With a view to ensuring neutrality and the proper functioning of the platform, the members of the network have created an association: the Blockchain Association for Finance.

Systematic and real-time compliance status

The platform allows EAMs and banks users to track and receive real-time alerts for all changes to ensure the compliance of documents and information shared. It monitors, reports and analyzes events and changes while ensuring the security of the environment thanks to Hyperledger Fabric. This solution enhances the security by allowing the user to instantly know who made a specific change, when, and from which entity. Since the data stored is authenticated by multiple institutions and continually up to date, the compliance offices have a real-time reporting of the compliance status and can share it at any time to the management or the external auditors.

Custodian banks save time by accessing in one place standard and structured information coming from their EAM. And they have a real-time compliance status linked to all data. Wecan Comply solution drives efficiency and cost effectiveness, reducing the painful administrative work. Banks are processing top-notch quality of data since all information is validated by other banks of the network. All exchanges are digital, onboardings are faster and there is a real-time auditability of all modifications.

Why we choose Hyperledger Fabric

Wecan Comply uses Hyperledger Fabric, an open source blockchain platform for enterprises hosted by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric enables private actors to exchange information while retaining ownership of their data. Each party is clearly identified, and every transaction is authenticated, authorized, validated and tracked.

Thanks to Hyperledger Fabric there is no central administrator: each bank and EAM controls its own information in a fully encrypted and secured network. As a solution provider, Wecan Comply does not have access to the information exchanged. It is only powering the network. Hyperledger Fabric offers a high level of security by ensuring that data access is only made after the user’s private key has been verified by the system. This eliminates the chance of unauthorized access and gives individuals greater control over their information. In addition, the platform is certified by a zero-knowledge proof technology that allows to protect the privacy of all users and to decentralize data control and sharing.

The world of compliance tomorrow

The union of financial players within a network offers good prospects for development. In particular, data exchange among custodian banks, regulatory bodies and auditors will benefit from significant gains in efficiency.

The next step for Wecan Comply is the connection to the official registers that will create a real ecosystem around compliance and thus release all the value of the platform. Wecan Comply was initiated with and for the actors of the financial industry. Our ambition is then to apply this method to all regulated professions where there are standards in order to guarantee a monitoring and audit of compliance in real time.

Jan 28

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Cool Careers in Open Source: Sharing our stories at Grace Hopper

By Daniela Barbosa, VP of World Wide Alliances, Hyperledger Blog, Working Group

Over the last few years, Hyperledger has sponsored the annual Anita Borg Grace Hopper Celebration (GCH) supporting our existing member companies as well as leaders and future women technologists in our global community. In 2021, as part of our Diversity, Civility and Inclusion WG objectives, we will continue to form partnerships with women-led initiatives centered around recruitment and engagement like Anita Borg.

For those of you who have not attended, the Grace Hopper Celebration is an experience like no other. In normal years, the event centers around the grand hall, full of hundreds and hundreds of booths, wholly focused on recruiting women technologists. There is an audible buzz in the air as the thousands and thousands of young women walk the floor, dash to their next scheduled interview or head to the another thought-provoking session. For women in technology, the feeling that GHC evokes is hard to beat elsewhere.

GHC brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront and highlights the contributions of women to the tech world. The event results in collaborative proposals, networking, and mentoring for all attendees. And, for many of us senior executives, walking alongside the next generation of women leaders in technology in the halls, in the lunches and events and collaboration sessions creates a renewed sense of optimism. We feel and see hope in these young, aspiring technologists.

As was the case for most global events in 2020, GHC, which took place in September, was virtual this year. Although you can never replicate an in-person event, especially one that is so focused on networking and building lifelong relationships with your fellow female technologists, the Linux Foundation workshop on “Cool Careers in Open Source” certainly had some of that feeling when the session began. It was clear from the start that something special was going to take place when over 500 attendees joined the session. And, when prompted to say hello as they came in, shared in chat their names and where they were joining from in a fast and furious stream of chats that sparked a few minutes of joy that you can see the speakers react to as the video starts.

The goal of the session was to help attendees learn how open source software is used by major motion picture studios like Netflix and Industrial Light & Magic for visual effects and by major retailers like Walmart in industry shaping blockchain-based networks.

So a large and eager attendee base mingled with a very cool list of speakers that spanned across four different parts of the Linux Foundation for a lively discussion about how open source software is everywhere. As a result, chances are high that young women entering the tech workforce will be writing, deploying, or administering open source and that candidates with experience in open source will stand out to hiring managers. Speakers and attendees all shared background, tips and resources and responded to a lot of great questions. The video below captures the discussion of how to get involved in open source at the start of one’s career:

Representing Hyperledger
Archana Sristy, Sr. Director- Blockchain Platforms, Walmart Global Tech and Hyperledger Governing Board Member

Representing Academy Software Foundation (ASWF)
Carol Payne, Imaging Specialist Netflix
Rachel Rose, R&D Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic, Co-Chair ASWF Diversity & Inclusion Working Group

Representing Cloud Native Foundation (CNCF)
Priyanka Sharma, General Manager CNCF

Representing Linux Foundation Training
Mary Campbell, Sr. Manager of Corporate Training at the Linux Foundation

The message was clear: open source software has the potential to level the playing field when it comes to diversity and inclusion – communities are open to everyone, it’s a meritocracy, and there are ample opportunities to build your resume and network while working alongside developers and engineers from forward-thinking companies that are part of the Linux Foundation like Walmart, Netflix, Disney, Microsoft, AT&T, Toyota, Uber, and more. There are thousands of communities out there where you can get started, learn new skills, develop/refine those skills, and gain experience that can lead to careers in tech, retail, motion pictures, banking, automotive, and more.

Here are just some of the resources available to anyone interested in getting involved in open source in the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger community:

Training – Gain marketable open source skills with the Linux Foundation

Training is an on-ramp to opportunity in the software development industry, especially in open source. 93% of hiring managers are unable to find enough individuals with the open source skills they require. Take advantage by gaining in-demand skills and set yourself up for a successful long-term career.

The Linux Foundation Training & Certification catalog has 32 free courses available across various technologies, including key introductory ones like A Beginner’s Guide to Open Source Software Development (LFD102-Free), as well as training and certifications from beginners to advance that you can purchase.

For Hyperledger, check out our free Blockchain Essentials Courses as well as our growing list of trainings and certifications. When you are ready to jump into the community, please watch our short “Getting Involved with Hyperledger” video.

Mentorship – Make personal connections that drive success

Mentorship plays an important role in advancing everyone’s career. Sharing experiences, connections and ideas flattens learning curves and, especially in open source, drives innovation and success on the individual and community level. Mentorship is a particularly powerful way to help grow and shape individual careers through personal relationships.

To make the power of mentorship more widely accessible, the Linux Foundation has many programs that all have diversity-specific opportunities:

Hyperledger Mentorship program: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/INTERN/Hyperledger+Mentorship+Program
CNCF Mentoring: https://github.com/cncf/mentoring
LFX Mentoring: https://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/tools/mentorship

Below are excerpts from the online Q+A with guidance our cool panelists offered during the panel. Listen in on the video to hear the full discussion!!

“I would say explore as much as you can, expand your network. Don’t be afraid to take classes and try things not directly in your major – you never know what you’ll enjoy. Don’t stress too much about specializing if you don’t want to.”

“Great question! Early in my schooling and my career, being involved in open source really helped me understand what it is like working in a larger code base. I learned a lot from other developers about engineering design and became more confident about having others review my code. These are skills that are directly applicable to my day-to-day work. The networking that comes from contributing to open source also can’t be overemphasized!”

“I believe anyone can pick up the skills! The job I have now I didn’t have any training on in school. Use the skills and what you learned in CS and jump in if you’re passionate – don’t be afraid to start entry level – you learn so much that way! “

“Open source is open source! Contributions are always welcome – jump in and get involved! All projects have contribution guidelines that are there to make sure the project rules are followed. As you start to contribute more, most projects have opportunities to get involved in the leadership / core contributions of the project.”

“Open source contributions always look good on a resume, provide new skills, and help you network! However, there’s not a direct way to apply to work in open source. My job at Netflix just happens to rely heavily on open source software which means I get the opportunity to contribute as a part of my job!”

How you can help make the community more welcoming

Participation and sponsorship of events alone won’t make Hyperledger a community where everyone feels included, although it is one way we can support diversity. There are certainly other things that can be done to make Hyperledger more inclusive and diverse, and we welcome your input on what else we should be doing. Please feel free to post to the Diversity Civility and Inclusion mailing list, or join our regular DCI calls with your suggestions and ideas.

PS. Big shout out to Ramona “Spielberg,” an 11-year-old future something, with some impressive video editing skills for helping her mom (VP World Wide Alliances at the Linux Foundation) with editing the zoom recording for sharing.

Jan 21

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Meet the Hyperledger India Chapter community! – Part II

By Hyperledger India Chapter Blog, Regional Chapter

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2020 has been a tough year for everyone. The world is now in a new phase, where no one knows when things will return back to normal. It is really bitter and harsh. Yet, despite obvious hardships, the crisis inspired innovations and, yes, encouraged a lot of community contributions.

This Year Saintgits College of Engineering joined hands with Hyperledger India Chapter to organise “Women in Blockchain – a Panel Discussion,” with an objective to accelerate the powerful partnerships of women to lead in the education, development and promotion of blockchain technologies. There has always been a general conception that technology is hostile to women. There are people who believe technology is not feminine. There are people who question the ability of a woman to start a business. They believe women are too risk-averse to start a new business. It’s high time these age-old myths were busted. They need to be busted from their very roots. “Women in Blockchain” was the right platform to bring in amazing women from the field of blockchain technology who have placed their imprints in the technical arena. The event aimed to be a myth breaker demonstrating to the world how successful women have overcome their barriers to be world class leaders in blockchain technology, highlighting their accomplishments in the community and offering actionable tips for “How to start a successful career in Blockchain.“

The following female voices were there on the panel.

Dr. Jane Thomason, Co-Founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of Fintech Worldwide
Ms. Shalini Warrier, Executive Director, Chief Operating Officer and Business Head
Ms. Nappinai N S, Advocate, Supreme Court of India
Ms. Darshitha Gillies, CEO Maanch; Advisor, Impact Investor; Philanthropist
Ms. Sosu Alex, Blockchain Technical Architect at Tata Consultancy Services

In addition, we also had the privilege of organising the Hyperledger Asia Pacific Study Circle for the course “Introduction to Hyperledger Blockchain Technologies” by the Linux Foundation, which is hosted in the edX platform. Since this is an introductory course, we focused on nontechnical, business-oriented audiences and students so as to equip them with basics of Hyperledger technologies and eventually prepare them to take the certification exam by the Linux Foundation.

Looking forward to contributing more, and I request everyone who is involved in blockchain space to join our journey.

Aneena Ann Alexander
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Saintgits College of Engineering-Kerala

Hyperledger turned five this year, a great milestone for Hyperledger and its community. I started this year by getting acquainted with Hyperledger India Chapter (HIRC) and its first event of the year, “HyperHack 2020.” I participated with my team and won the Hackathon as runner-up. It was a well executed event by the community and saw participation from across Asia Pacific. I had been working on various Hyperledger project implementations, but this event got me and many others like me to connect to the India community.

I also got introduced to the “Hyperledger Noida Meetup Group” and became its co-organizer.

During the middle of the year, HIRC organized the “Blockchain Stories 2020” event. That saw huge participation by industry and academic experts who shared their blockchain journey, solutions and experiences. I myself participated at the event and shared our product and experience with the community. Along with many enthusiasts, I got the chance to volunteer at the event. It was a great success that helped the community membership grow and achieve 1,000 followers and beyond.

In the last quarter of the year, HIRC organized “Blockchain Techfest,” which allowed the community to know about various Hyperledger projects, connect with their maintainers and learn how we can contribute to them. Volunteering at this event and at the “5th year anniversary” got me connected to many other Hyperledger enthusiasts and various meetup group organizers and gave me the opportunity to work with them to spread the word.

I feel that this journey has just begun. I am looking forward to contributing to the community more actively here in India and abroad; and to a better new year for all who live on this Earth, people, plants, animals and birds alike.

Vikram Sharma
Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator
Senior Blockchain Architect, HCL Technologies Ltd.
Co-organizer, Hyperledger Noida Meetup Group
Member, Hyperledger India Chapter

Every journey starts with a challenge, and challenges become memories and memories become a service. With that said, my exploration started with the Hyperledger India Chapter, and it’s time to share the memories. The year started with small but committed community members sharing their thoughts and answering questions on Hyperledger projects, helping learners to begin their journey. Fast forward to today, and we see a much larger community of members sharing their thoughts and answering questions brought up by new learners.

Many individuals from the India community do participate in Hyperledger project meetings, working groups and special interest groups. I am proud to be part of the Language Translations WG, Learning Material Development WG and Climate Action SIG, as well as the Besu, Iroha, Sawtooth and Indy projects.

The members have shared their solutions and tutorials to increase awareness and build community participation. The number of blockchain enthusiasts showing their interest in Hyperledger India Chapter activities is remarkable.

While 2020 turned out to be a milestone year, there is more to achieve in 2021. I wish for and I will make every effort to build an even stronger and better community for Hyperledger.

Ravi Vasagam
Blockchain & DevOps Consultant
CTO, ENACT eSolutions

This blog post concludes our series of blog posts featuring the community. The very first event of 2021 is planned to be held in March. HyperHack 2021 will be organized in collaboration with the Saintgits College of Engineering. Reach out to the co-leads of the Hyperledger India Chapter for more information to know how you or your organization can be part of the event.

Special thanks to Amol Kulkarni for laying the cornerstone to the Hyperledger India Chapter. Also, gratitude to Shon Joseph, Ajay Jadhav, Kiran Kalyan Kulkarni, Ankita Patidar, Lakshay Gaur, meetup organizers across the country, event coordinators, poster masters and many more. They have all been a major part of our journey this year!

We would have loved to hear from all of you in this blog series.

Want to join us? Join the Hyperledger India Chapter mailing list, follow us on LinkedIn, chat with us on Rocket.Chat.

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