Marsh announced it is collaborating with IBM, ACORD and its client, ISN, to develop a commercial blockchain solution for proof of insurance.By using blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, Marsh said the certificate of insurance process will be transformed “from complicated and manual to streamlined and transparent, allowing clients to speed up necessary business functions such as hiring contractors and transferring risk while increasing coverage certainty.”
More here.
Credit card giant American Express has joined the Linux Foundation-led open-source cross-industry blockchain working group, the Hyperledger Project.
In yet another noted example of the traditional financial services industry turning to Fintech’s poster child in blockchain technology, American Express has joined the Hyperledger Project as a ‘Premier’ member.
More here.
Diverse set of new members joins fastest growing open blockchain initiative
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (December 28, 2016) – Hyperledger Project, a collaborative cross-industry effort created to advance blockchain technology, announced today that eight new members have joined the project to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications. Last month, Hyperledger announced it reached 100 active members in less than one year, a huge milestone for the open source project, hosted by The Linux Foundation.
“This year has been full of growth for the project,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “Not only did we exceed 100 members, Hyperledger met significant development milestones thanks to the community’s hard work. As 2016 was a year of exploration, R&D and prototyping, we’re excited for 2017 to be the year we start to see case studies of the technology in production environments.”
Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base. The latest members include: CA Technologies, Factom Foundation, Hashed Health, Koscom, LedgerDomain, Lykke, Sovrin Foundation and Swisscom.
New Member Quotes:
“To compete today, every company needs to foster innovation that delivers real business value. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt the way many of CA’s customers do business,” said Otto Berkes, chief technology officer, CA Technologies. “We’re honored to be a part of Hyperledger and look forward to collaborating with other members to help shape open standards for blockchain. It’s an exciting time for this because blockchain is not just about Bitcoin anymore, and the range of potential applications with it is vast for of our customers. This partnership will help us influence what that future looks like for both CA and our customers as they embark on their digital transformation journey.”
“We are honored to have been selected to join the Hyperledger Project,” said Paul Snow, Founder, Factom Foundation. “We are looking forward to helping build the open source framework for securing data and systems with our blockchain solution.”
“Hashed Health is a healthcare technology innovation company focused on accelerating the commercialization of meaningful new blockchain and distributed ledger-based technologies,” said John Bass, Hashed Health CEO. “Hashed is proud to be a member of the Hyperledger Project, sharing its commitment to creating the foundation for scalable, reliable blockchain solutions.”
“We consider blockchain technology as the next generation infrastructure in the Korean capital market. As an industry leader with 40 years’ experience in the financial IT field, we are looking to leverage this industry disruptive technology,” said Chung Youn Dae, CEO, Koscom. “We will constantly explore the ways to contribute to the blockchain ecosystem, as we collaborate with the Hyperledger community. We also hope to better serve out customers in a more secure and efficient way by integrating blockchain technology and our own Fintech platform.”
“LedgerDomain delivers next generation supply chain solutions, harnessing permissioned blockchains to assure supply chain integrity and finished product authenticity through to the consumer for the benefit of all. This highly transparent, trustworthy approach is built upon an industrial-strength Hyperledger Fabric backbone,” said Dr. Victor Dods, LedgerDomain. “We’re proud to be a part of Hyperledger and its growing community.”
“We’re looking forward to being part of the Hyperledger project,” said Richard Olsen, Lykke founder and CEO. “Our company is building a digital asset exchange. Right now, we’re implemented on the Bitcoin blockchain settlement layer, with Ethereum to come within the next few months, but our involvement with Hyperledger isn’t just the next step forward. Providing decentralized settlement on the Hyperledger blockchain with multisignature wallets and atomic swap transactions will benefit both of our user communities.”
“We are very proud to be Switzerland’s first connection to Hyperledger,” said Johannes Höhener, VP, Swisscom’s Fintech Cluster. “We look forward to working with a highly professional community on cutting-edge blockchain developments. Our membership and participation will shape our capabilities to develop blockchain solutions – for our clients and Switzerland.”
The success of Hyperledger is due to the support of the developer community and member companies. Learn how your organization can contribute to the project here: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/join
About Hyperledger
The Hyperledger project is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger as a Collaborative Project under the foundation. To learn more, visit: www.hyperledger.org
We’re pleased to announce that the distributed ledger project, Iroha, has been accepted into incubation status under Hyperledger. Originally developed by Hyperledger member company, Soramitsu, Iroha was inspired by the Fabric architecture and aims to provide a development environment where C++, web, and mobile application developers can contribute to the Hyperledger Project.
What is Iroha?
Iroha seeks to complement Fabric, Sawtooth Lake, and other potential projects, by creating reusable components in C++ that can be called from languages such as Go. In this way, Iroha is additive to existing projects and the long term goal is to realize a robust library of reusable components that can be selected and used freely by those running distributed ledgers on Hyperledger technology.
“Iroha allows even more developers to interact with Hyperledger to build infrastructural projects and applications requiring distributed ledger technology,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger. “It is encouraging to see member companies actively contributing to a diverse and sustainable open source blockchain ecosystem built on cooperation.”
The design and architecture of Iroha is greatly inspired by Fabric, in that blockchain and chaincode services form the overall architecture. Where possible, APIs were made to be similar to Fabric and, rather than competing with Fabric, the goals of Iroha are to:
Why Iroha?
Currently, the Hyperledger Project lacks an infrastructure project written in C++, thus limiting the potential developers who can contribute. Also, there is not currently a strong focus on user interaction or mobile applications, though both are necessary for the realization of the widespread use of distributed ledger technology. Iroha aims to rectify both of these points, bringing in more developers while providing libraries for mobile user interface development.
Iroha is a distributed ledger project that was designed to be simple and easy to incorporate into infrastructural projects requiring distributed ledger technology. Iroha features:
Although turing complete smart contracts are available via chaincode in Java (running a sandboxed JVM), users do not need to write chaincode in order to define digital assets in Iroha. Common use cases, such as deploying new currencies and sending text messages, are available as part of the core framework. Iroha is composed of the following:
Iroha core provides the distributed ledger infrastructure comprising the data membership services, consensus algorithm, peer-to-peer network transmission, data validation, and chaincode infrastructure. The iOS, Android, and JavaScript libraries provide convenience functions for performing common operations, such as digitally signing transactions. Future work will expand these common functions to interoperate with the Fabric ledger.
Who will work on Iroha?
Soramitsu has committed several full time engineers to the project. Makoto Takemiya of Soramitsu is the initial project maintainer, along with six other engineers at Soramitsu. Besides Soramitsu, the co-sponsors of the proposal and other Hyperledger members are considering committing resources to work on Iroha including Toshiya Cho of Hitachi, Takahiro Inaba of NTT Data, and Mark Smargon of Colu.
Soramitsu is also doing collaborative research with The University of Tokyo, The University of Aizu, and Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM, below) of International University of Japan. From the University of Tokyo, Hideyuki Tanaka will consider economics use cases with Iroha. From The University of Aizu, Yasushi Fujii will explore business use cases with Iroha. From GLOCOM, Soichiro Takagi will consider economics and scientific research using Iroha.
“We’re pleased that Iroha has been accepted for incubation into Hyperledger,” said Makoto Takemiya at Soramitsu. “By creating C++, mobile, and web development environments for Hyperledger, new developers can join the project and help contribute not only to Iroha, but to other sub projects, such as Fabric and Sawtooth Lake.”
Learn more about Iroha
Working with community members and use case partners, we would like to continue to improve upon Iroha and have it reach and active project stage in the future. The end goal is to realize a suite of components that can be freely interoperable with other Hyperledger projects.
The following repositories on github have been created to manage Iroha resources:
You can learn more about Iroha in this whitepaper or other incubation projects under Hyperledger here. Iroha documentation can be found at http://docs.iroha.tech. For those interested in additional information, please reach out to: info@hyperledger.org
The first ever Hyperledger Hackathon took place October 1-2 in Amsterdam. More than 120 developers (20 teams) gathered for the event organized by ABN AMRO, IBM, Holland Fintech and Hyperledger.
During the Hackathon, teams of students, fintechs, start-ups, and staff from IBM and ABN AMRO had 36 hours to build their own application on Hyperledger. As part of their efforts, they were allowed to tap the expertise of visiting experts from the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee and others. At the end of the 36-hour period, a jury assessed the teams’ proposals and applications with a focus on application value to clients and business as well as its technical implementation.
The energy and enthusiasm of the teams was incredible to watch. Each team had a deep appreciation of the technology and how it could be applied. A few of the teams even slept at the venue, working through the night to polish their implementation and pitch!
The winning team (pictured below) built a practical application for the storage of medical information, controlled and updated by medical experts and patients as owners of the data. Each team member won an Oculus Rift.
Following the Hackathon was the Hyperledger Hackfest, which took place on October 3-4 in the ABN AMRO Innovation Centre. 60 developers attended. This marked the first time the bi-monthly international Hackfest was held in Europe.
Some of the agenda items addressed at the event included:
If you are interested in further engaging with the technical community, sign up for one or more of the mailing lists at https://lists.hyperledger.org/mailman/listinfo.
JPMorgan has unveiled what it calls a “distributed cryptoledger”, presented during this week’s meeting of the technical steering committee for the Linux Foundation-led open-source Hyperledger Project.