Road to Hyperledger Global Forum

The third Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF) is coming up quickly (June 8-10). While this year HGF will be virtual, we’ve gathered in the past in Basel, Switzerland, and Phoenix, Arizona, and are looking forward to meeting in person again in 2022. 

One of the big goals for this year is to make Hyperledger Global Forum as successful and welcoming as past events, even in its virtual format. To help keep us our eyes on that prize, we asked speakers from past events about their involvement and experience at previous HGFs. 

The great thing about our community is that it’s home to a mix of technologists, developers, business users and innovators from starts-ups, enterprises, solution providers, research labs and universities from around the world. And they all have a voice at Hyperledger Global Forum. 

Read on for more about what brought 10 past speakers from across our extensive community to HGF and what made the event stand out to them. They also share updates on their projects and use cases and on the trends and technologies on their radars now. 

Tell us a little bit about why you chose to speak at HGF and what your goal was

Baohua Yang, Oracle America, Inc.: “Share the experience of using Hyperledger technologies and also raise existing problems from real user cases. Also trigger thoughts for the Hyperledger roadmap.”

Ben Taylor, LedgerDomain / Clinical Supply Blockchain Working Group: “Hyperledger Fabric is an exciting project with flexible modular design, the backing of major industry players, a healthy developer community, great documentation, and a plethora of tutorials and ‘hello world’ code samples. At the same time, it’s maddeningly difficult to develop an end-to-end understanding of Fabric as a platform, create custom deployments, and develop real-world user-facing applications backed by smart contracts. 

This is as much a social and political challenge as it is a technological challenge, and requires the ability to work with various stakeholders to demonstrate value as well as set a clear direction. Along with showcasing results from a real-world use case of Hyperledger Fabric, we wanted to share our insights and strategies related to the key questions of governance and orchestration.”

Markus Stauffiger, 4eyes GmbH: “I often profit from other people’s efforts and know-how and hoped to give something back by sharing our experience to those starting with Hyperledger.” 

Mohan Venkataraman, Chainyard: “As a blockchain practitioner and technology evangelist, I was quite motivated to share my experiences, thought leadership and make connections. I have worked on over 30 projects, some in Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum and a bit on Aris and BigChainDb. The learnings have been tremendous and sharing that with fellow practitioners and learning from their success and failures was part of it.”

Tell us a little about your experience speaking and attending HGF

Thomas Goetz, PostFinance AG: “It was striking to see the worldwide interest in the Hyperledger project. We had a number of interesting conversations and contacts before and after our presentation.”

Mohan: “It was amazing as we have an over full room of over 150 attendees, despite of being the last presentation of the day. The questions were pouring and people were curious about our experience in building highly performant Fabric solutions. Our methodology, accelerators and reference architectures were well appreciated.”

Saptarshi Choudhury, Paramount Software Solutions: “I loved the live interaction with the audience from different parts of the world who helped co-create values while speaking as a panelist, and I truly enjoyed all the sessions of the Hyperledger Global Forum.”

Shengwei You, University of Notre Dame: “It’s a very informative and awesome experience, and I feel everything was arranged well.”

What is the most memorable part of attending and speaking at HGF?

Benjamin Djidi: “The people. I was really impressed by the different project bearers and contributors.”

Markus Stauffiger: “The openness, sharing of ideas, experiences and know-how. The no-bullshit attitude, where critical thinking is welcome. Also the inclusiveness, which is very obvious with the people, but it extends to all aspects, such as technology & philosophy.”

Thomas Bohner, IntellectEU: “Meeting new people and building long-term partnerships and client relationships.”

Thomas Goetz: “The keynotes gave a very good overview of the ecosystem and emerging trends. It was very motivating to be part of the community.”

How has your project/use case with Hyperledger tech progressed since you spoke at HGF? 

Ben Taylor: “Since we shared our results from the BRUINchain study, we have extended the framework to encompass all prescription drugs in the United States, an*d have tested it at scale and with production data. The framework is currently in the process of being rolled out with participating health centers and drug manufacturers. We published the results of our pilot with UCLA Health, Genentech, Amgen, Sanofi and others in December 2020, and at time of writing our peer-review study with real-world enhanced drug verification is set to be published in the next several days.”

Mathews Thomas, IBM: “Multiple use cases were covered and several have gone into production with various clients. Also kept in touch with some folks I met and continue exchanging ideas.”

Saptarshi Choudhury: “We are now in a pilot stage with our Farm2Plate solution and also developing another product catering democratization of energy by P2P energy trade.We are also working on a Social impact project with BlueNumber on ID for farmers.”

Shengwei You: “I was a summer intern for the Hyperledger Caliper project. More users are paying attention to this project, and I feel there are more improvements we can do to make things better and more user friendly.”

What new enterprise blockchain topics, technologies or trends are on your radar?

Baohua: “Zero knowledge, China standard of crypto, PBFT implementation”

Benjamin Djidi: “Aries is very interesting. I’m generally fond of ZKP topics and followings updates to the existing frameworks (especially Fabric, Indy, Ursa).”

Mathews: “Application of blockchain in emerging areas for different industries (e.g ,Telecom – 5G, Media – Decentralized media network)”

Thomas Bohner: “CBDC, Digital Cash, Quantum Technology”

Hyperledger Global Forum, taking place June 8-10, will provide an opportunity to learn and understand various aspects of the ecosystem, including technical roadmaps, milestones and the latest uses and applications across industries and markets for Hyperledger projects and other related technologies. 

To register for the virtual event, go here.