Blog Archives – Hyperledger

Oct 15

Weekend Update: This Week’s Round-up of Remote Blockchain Learning Resources

By Hyperledger Blog, Weekend Update

Welcome to the Weekend Update. Our goal with this weekly post is to share quick updates about online education, networking and collaboration opportunities and resources for the open source enterprise blockchain community.

If you have suggestions for resources or events that we should spotlight in a future Weekend Update, let us know here using #HLWeekendUpdate.

Hyperledger In-depth: An hour with Ledger Leopard

Say goodbye to your double administration, balance reconciliation, and lost items! In this webinar, Olivier Rikken of Ledger Leopard will share details about a production supply chain traceability deployment. RTI Blockchain is an online platform where all types of “Reusable Transport Items” such as pallets, crates, and roll containers used by retailers can quickly be registered and exchanged between connected parties in the logistic process. RTI Blockchain provides an overview of all packaging bearing registration in one place, with one tool as a service. With the use of blockchain technology, all participants of the supply chains are linked, have real-time insights in their packaging data, and can share information privately and transparently.

Tune in on Wednesday, October 20, at 8:00 AM EDT. For more information and to register, go here.

Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group Guest Presentation: Blockchain Data Coordination and Incentives in P2P Networks
Join the Telecom SIG for a talk by Dr. Owen Vaughan and Dr. Alexandru Paunoiu from nChain on “Blockchain Data Coordination and Incentives in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networks.” Data distribution in P2P networks is a well-studied concept in the literature, with Gnutella being an example of a network offering such services. They can be analyzed from multiple perspectives such as performance, topology, and incentives. In their work, these presenters are focused on incentivizing data distribution with economic rewards. A lack of economic incentives can lead to P2P networks having difficulty scaling. The solution they propose uses a blockchain as a coordinator of P2P networks in order to add economic incentives for data transfers and remove the problem of Sybil attacks.

The discussion will also cover the emergence of high performance public blockchains over the last two years. These are characterized by high transaction volume, low fees, and data storage capability. Additionally, the talk will touch on different approaches and their challenges from a telecommunications viewpoint. Such blockchains are good candidates for a coordinator of other P2P networks.

For more information on the meeting, which is Thursday, October 21, at 9:00 AM PDT, go here.

Virtual Meetups

Wednesday, October 20, at 16:00 UTC / 12:00 EDT: Hyperledger Washington DC hosts “State of blockchain adoption for Supply Chain applications”
Thursday, October 21, at 16:00 UTC / 12:00 EDT: Hyperledger Atlanta hosts “Hyperledger Fabric V2 in Action- Best Practices for HF V2 Migration”

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Oct 13

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Writing the Next Chapter for Hyperledger

By Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation Blog

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Related stories:
– Passing the Baton by Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation, Linux Foundation
– Hyperledger is almost six years old, but who’s counting by Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation, DTCC, and Chair of the Hyperledger Governing Board
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After four years of co-leading the Hyperledger project alongside Brian Behlendorf, I am pleased to be taking the reins as Executive Director as part of my new role as General Manager of Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity at the Linux Foundation. The Hyperledger community is one of the most rewarding communities to work with across the world, and it is my honor to lead Hyperledger in our next growth phase.

I told myself in the summer of 2017 that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to go work at the Linux Foundation on one of the hottest enterprise blockchain projects alongside Brian Behlendorf, a leading figure in the open source community. When I joined the Hyperledger team as Vice President of World Wide Alliances, it was the era of Long Island Blockchain Ice Tea. Companies were changing their name to include the word “blockchain” even if they were not using blockchain technologies, and ICOs were making fast money with little to no output in code and solutions. In contrast, the Hyperledger community, backed by some of the world’s biggest enterprises, was building, delivering and focusing not on the froth but on making an impact across multiple industries and regions.

For the last four years, I have seen the Hyperledger landscape grow from a couple of initial projects, Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth, to a slate of 17 DLTs, Libraries and Tools including the recent addition of Hyperledger Firefly. According to LFXInsights, in the last three years, there has been a 53% growth in the total commits and new code contributors increased by 37%. A total of 366 organizations from both large and small companies have made code commits since 2016. And the pace of activity among new community members is accelerating as commits by new contributors have increased by 286% in the last year.

Some of the largest and most important production enterprise blockchain projects today are built using Hyperledger technologies. They range from supply chain networks, like IBM and Walmart’s Food Trust (Hyperledger Fabric) and Circulor’s mine to manufacturer traceability of a conflict-mineral for automobile sustainable supply chains (Hyperledger Fabric), to top trade finance platforms TradeLens and we.trade, which both use Hyperledger Fabric. They also include the first production CBDC deployments like the the National Bank of Cambodia (Hyperledger Iroha) and Central Bank of Nigeria CBDC (Hyperledger Fabric) as well as pilots and projects like Project Inthanon-LionRock (Hyperledger Besu), a prototype developed by Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank of Thailand, People’s Bank of China, and Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates that recently demonstrated the potential of digital currencies and distributed ledger technology (DLT) to reduce costs and speed up cross-border payments.

Our Hyperledger community also supports a number of the leading global Digital Identity-related deployments, including many European Digital Identity projects like the recent launch of IDunion (Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries), supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy of Germany and companies like Siemens, which is building an open ecosystem for self sovereign identities controlled by users. Other Hyperledger-powered identity solutions include Africa’s first national decentralized ID system, launched by Kiva, and various digital identity initiatives in Canada including the government of British Columbia.

Back in 2017, right after I joined Hyperledger, I was wearing a Hyperledger t-shirt while sitting at the Toronto airport on my way back home from Sibos, the annual banking and financial conference organized by SWIFT. I was minding my own business when a very excited man came to sit by me. Always wary of strangers, I shifted uncomfortably because there were many seats around me open. Why did he have to come sit next to me? With a big smile he pointed to my t-shirt and asked if I was a developer and using Hyperledger. I explained that I was on Hyperledger staff, and he then went on to tell me enthusiastically about the use case he was delivering in payment remittances for his homeland country. I wish I remembered who this man was and what the project he was building. The business card got lost and, after a five-day stint at Sibos, where the story “I am building so and so with Hyperledger” was a common refrain, I have lost that specific company. What stays with me, however, is the joy of seeing and hearing the passionate story of how this technology was solving a real problem.

Although today, I am not spending a lot of time at airports due to COVID travel restrictions, I continue to talk to companies on a weekly basis that are building with Hyperledger. These companies range from some of the largest retail stores to governments building important distributed ledger projects across various public sector use cases to healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, insurance and banks and other financial services and small start-ups around the world who are building the next generation of enterprise systems. Real development, real enterprise use cases, but today with a little less Blockchain Ice Tea labels.

With over 200 member companies, including the world’s largest brands like Walmart, Bosch, Telefonica and CVS Health; the top enterprise technology companies such as Accenture, Ant Financial (Alibaba), IBM, ConsenSys, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Tencent; and financial giants like DTCC, JPMorgan, Visa and American Express as well as government organizations like the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Bank of England, our member community continues to grow in support of Hyperledger. Here at Hyperledger, we are an open source developer community, one with roots and anchors to the giants of open source at the Linux Foundation, including the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Let’s Encrypt, Automotive Grade Linux and many more.

We are here to serve our community of enterprise blockchain developers.

Today’s enterprise blockchain ecosystem is quite different from when Hyperledger launched in 2016. The fast-evolving market has created demand for a mix of permissioned and permissionless (who can write to a blockchain), public and private (who can read from a blockchain) and hybrid networks. This spectrum proves that our multi-DLT framework approach works for the diverse needs of today’s global economy and will continue to shift to meet the demands of developers and users. Our recent Hyperledger brand survey confirms much of the progress both the industry and Hyperledger have made and proves that blockchain technologies are here to stay. It’s exciting to think about where we go from here.

Over the next few weeks, you will be seeing an updated Hyperledger overview paper, more community focused goals that were identified in our recent Hyperledger Brand survey, and some more exciting news as we position ourselves for the next five years and beyond.

What we have built at Hyperledger in the last five years and are planning to build in the next five are technologies and communities that will be with us for a long time. I am both invigorated and humbled by the opportunity to lead this community into the next phase of enterprise blockchain as General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity with Executive Director duties at Hyperledger.

Be on the lookout for more stories from the field in our new Hyperledger Staff Corner and, if you want to tell us your own story, please reach out.

— Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation

Oct 13

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Hyperledger is almost six years old, but who’s counting

By Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation, DTCC, and Chair of the Hyperledger Governing Board Blog

Taking stock of global accomplishments and looking to transitions ahead

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Related stories:
– Passing the Baton by Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation, Linux Foundation
– Writing the Next Chapter for Hyperledger by Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation
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In December of 2015, 30 firms from around the globe and representing a diverse range of industries came together with the Linux Foundation to found and kick-start the Hyperledger project. The project began with a vision of creating a global open source community that would use the concepts from the emergent public blockchains to build enterprise grade, open source, distributed ledger software to solve real-world business challenges.

Now we head into the 4^th quarter of 2021 with six graduated projects, 11 incubating projects, over 75 projects in our lab, a growing community of hundreds of members, thousands of lines of code contributions, and hundreds of thousands of library downloads. Today, more than 350 companies have participated in contributing code to Hyperledger’s projects.

We had an early goal, written into our mission statement, to engage with the leading members of the ecosystem. We all knew that it was very early in the development of the “internet of transactions” and that we should be open to ideas and contributions from the best and the brightest. And we have had major contributions of code from the leading inventors in this space, including long standing enterprises and major technology firms, as well as startups and fintechs and even interested individuals. As a result, Hyperledger’s prolific code projects include solutions that support the most secure, private, multi-party ledger networks as well as solutions that work with the largest public networks, and most of the space in between. Even in this new and emerging ecosystem, multiple recent surveys and reports have shown that Hyperledger has leading market share among major enterprises that are implementing DLT solutions.

With Hyperledger projects being deployed around the world, in every industry, we are learning about new ways the technology is being leveraged, literally every day. Much of the intelligence comes from presentations at Hyperledger events about the new ways that our projects are being used – adding visibility to the shipping and food industries, tracking the provenance and journey of diamonds, securing digital rights for music and distributing royalties and many more. Some recent examples that have gotten attention include:

Mitsubishi’s Americas trading business used Skuchain’s Distributed Ledger Payment Commitment (DLPC) functionality, built on Hyperledger Fabric, to purchase metals worth US$43mn from a mine in Peru, with payment made through Mizuho Bank.
The Global Shipping Business Network, built on Hyperledger Fabric, went live and now handles one in three containers shipped around the world. Fabric nodes are hosted in both international and China territories.
BondEvalue launched the world’s first fractional bond exchange with Hyperledger Sawtooth.
Nornickel launched Hyperledger Fabric-based tokens backed by nickel and copper.
Europe’s largest insurer, Allianz, went into production mid May with a Hyperledger Fabric based solution to streamline international motor insurance claims.
The Open Insurance Data Link platform, a project built on Hyperledger Fabric, launched to reduce the cost of insurance reporting and create a standardized insurance data repository using distributed ledger technology. Members of this network include AAIS, Travelers, The Hannover and The Hartford along with state insurance regulators like the Insurance Department of Connecticut.
The state of New York rolled out the Excelsior Pass, built on IBM’s Digital Health Pass, which is itself built on Hyperledger Fabric, to let state residents record and show their COVID vaccine status.
Over 40 airlines, including Air France, British Airways, Emirates, Etihad, Korean Air, Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic, have publicly announced trials of the The International Air Transport Association (IATA) Travel Pass, which leverages Evernym products built using Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries.
Palm introduced an NFT platform using Hyperledger Besu that has supported some large NFT launches in 2021. Palm blockchain is 99% more energy efficient than common proof of work systems.
GSMA eBusiness Network, built on Hyperledger Fabric, and led by six major telecom providers, announced commercial readiness to support settlement of payments for wholesale roaming across networks, ensuring readiness in the 5G and IoT era.

This progress is the result of all the prototype work of the past few years. We are now seeing the same ramp up of experiments and pilots in the game changing category of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Many of the central banks around the world are researching the best approach. While the full solution is still evolving, the common starting point for many of the global central banks is a secure, enterprise grade, open source, DLT platform, and Hyperledger projects have emerged as a leading solution. Some of the recent CBDC developments announced include:

Production launch of Bakong by the National Bank of Cambodia on Hyperledger Iroha
Central Bank of Nigeria’s choice of Hyperledger Fabric for its eNaira CBDC
A recent demonstration by Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank of Thailand, People’s Bank of China, and Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates of the potential of using digital currencies and distributed ledger technology (DLT) for delivering real-time, cheaper and safer cross-border payments and settlements using the Project Inthanon-LionRock prototype built on Hyperledger Besu
Monetary Authority of Singapore’s selection of ConsenSys/Visa submission with Hyperledger Besu, IBM submission with Hyperledger Fabric and Soramitsu submission with Hyperledger Iroha as finalists for its CBDC challenge
Release of Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) pilot retail CBDC, “DCash,” on Hyperledger Fabric

I would also like to point out the ongoing effort that Hyperledger has made to expand the expertise within our community, and, especially, to increase the diversity of the membership of the community so we build solutions that provide value to everyone without built in, or unintended limitation. More than 30% of our Hyperledger member companies have less than 50 employees and more than 50% of them are outside the Americas. Additionally, we have a worldwide calendar of meetups, a growing network of regional chapters and ongoing translation efforts. And we are working at the grassroots level with different universities and student groups as well as organizations like AnitaB.org to grow the diversity of our contributor community.

This progress, from early experiments that have moved to production, to broader integrated solutions and on to larger challenges like CBDCs are the clear indications of a new inflection point on the growth of DLT. We are now at the start of the next chapter: enhancing and strengthening the core technologies and improving and even standardizing the integrations and interoperability of solutions. The focus for the first years of Hyperledger was naturally getting the best expertise to execute the vision, develop the projects and get them production ready, and build the brand to be on the shortlist of any evaluation of DLT platforms. By any measure, these first years have been as successful as any DLT project, and certainly the most globally successful of any enterprise DLT platform. Now, as the focus shifts to supporting and enhancing the project base, expanding the community engagement, strengthening governance, and working with different industries on the next level of solutions, it is also a natural point for a leadership transition.

Brian Behlendorf, who has been the executive director of Hyperledger since shortly after its founding, is moving on to help start a new project in the Linux Foundation that will focus on the security of open source software. He will continue to be a senior advisor to Hyperledger and his new work will certainly include and benefit our community. We wish him the absolute best in his new endeavor, but we are also heartened that he will not be far if needed for guidance.

Daniela Barbosa, who has been Hyperledger’s Vice President of Worldwide Alliances, will move into the Executive Director seat and bring her strengths, enthusiasm and deep history and experience of working in industry to the job. In particular, her experience leading strategic initiatives and driving partnerships will be critical skills for success as she takes on building our community, bringing the many diverse perspectives and development models closer together and driving new solutions and new capabilities that will accelerate the adoption of our technologies. We are very excited for this next chapter.

The Governing Board and I look forward to working with new leadership and the rest of the member community on transforming and even creating markets with Hyperledger technologies:

“I’m pleased to welcome Daniela Barbosa as the new Executive Director for Hyperledger. I want to personally thank Brian Behlendorf for all he has done in this role. The Hyperledger community is going strong and we are excited for the next chapter with Daniela at the helm.” – Archana Sristy, Senior Director, Walmart Global Tech

“Glad to see Daniela recognized for her leadership. Her depth of experience will provide great continuity for Hyperledger and all the blockchain projects.” – Chris Ferris, IBM Fellow, CTO Open Technology

“There is no bigger champion for enterprise blockchain than Daniela Barbosa. She has been building and shaping this market for years. That work is showing up in deployments around the world. Her leadership will ensure that we, the Hyperledger community, will be the driving force in developing and deploying technology to power increasingly large and complex multi-party systems.” – David Treat, Senior Managing Director, Accenture

By Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation, DTCC, and Chair of the Hyperledger Governing Board

Oct 13

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Passing the Baton

By Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation, Linux Foundation Blog

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Related stories:
– Writing the Next Chapter for Hyperledger by Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation
– Hyperledger is almost six years old, but who’s counting by Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation, DTCC, and Chair of the Hyperledger Governing Board
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Today, I’m very pleased to announce that I’m passing the Hyperledger baton to Daniela Barbosa. Daniela has co-led the project with me for four years, working closely with not only each of our sponsoring members but also the TSC and most core maintainers, all of the SIG chairs and volunteers, and pretty much everyone else in the enterprise blockchain world. She knows perhaps better than anyone else on the planet the potential in (and the challenges to) the use of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in the enterprise. She is the perfect choice to take the executive director role and drive the next chapter of the Hyperledger story.

I jumped into Hyperledger in early 2016, not long after its founding and first code releases. I’d been following the crypto and blockchain space for a few years with a profound sense that something was missing. I felt certain there had to be a way to achieve the vision of a shared system of record, governed by consensus and programmable logic, that enables parties who don’t totally trust each other to be able to trust in the system – without requiring massive energy consumption and financial speculation as the underlying driver. The crisis of trust in governance institutions was well underway in 2016 and has accelerated since. Meanwhile, the Internet has only become more centralized, so much so it’s sometimes hard for most technologists to even understand what a distributed system looks like or why it should exist. It is just too easy to have someone “trusted” run a big central database – ignoring the huge and inevitable business, political, and social costs that come from being required to trust a central system. These costs become clearer every day.

In Hyperledger, I saw a community of developers taking new approaches that addressed many of these concerns, even while learning from – and eventually even connecting directly into – the innovation and good computer science taking place in the public ledger space. I saw developers passionate about using this technology to make markets more transparent and fair and auditable; to make supply chains more traceable (most of the Sustainable Development Goals can’t be achieved without that!); and soon after I joined, to pursue a very different approach to digital identity that is more distributed, human-rights-friendly, and relatable to end-users than the monstrous centralized-login approaches everywhere else.

I felt an edge to this not unlike the early days of Open Source software, even before the term was coined and defined in 1998. Early OSS developers and advocates were seen as loony idealists living a fantasy gift-economy world, when the conventional wisdom was that altruism didn’t scale and free-riders would destroy it. Strong personalities led to salacious headlines, lawsuits, and claims that OSS was a “cancer.” Meanwhile real companies were quietly using it. Then many started to support it, and then to push updates back upstream. Soon they were leading new initiatives in all sorts of domains even us idealists didn’t imagine, like software for cars and the energy grid. Open Source software culture says: we’re all going to go further, and get there faster, if we work together in a fair and open manner, especially as peers. Distributed ledger technology is in so many ways the embodiment of that ideal implemented directly into database and network architecture, and no less ambitious in its desire to reconstruct how we build software to serve our own needs and serve society at the same time.

In these five years we’ve gone from having a couple of good ideas to having a set of DLT platforms that collectively represent the vast majority of enterprise blockchain deployments around the world. Enterprise blockchain is no longer a contradiction in terms; or an idea yet to be proven. The Forbes Blockchain 50, the Deloitte report on enterprise blockchains, and our own conversations with and surveys of members indicate a very wide footprint across so many industries. When the majority of Central Bank Digital Currency projects are being piloted on a Hyperledger ledger, that’s a remarkable signal.

We have also built an amazing community of communities across our projects, a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. The level of transparency and space for spirited debate can feel exhausting at times! But we know it leads to better software and better communities in the end.

While I will be taking up the mantle of executive director of the Linux Foundation’s new OSSF project, I plan to stay involved with Hyperledger as a volunteer, advising Daniela and the staff and board and TSC and others on opportunities and threats I see out there. I’m enormously grateful to all of you for the opportunity to have served the community and its stakeholders these last five years. I know I’m leaving you all in terrific hands; I’m excited about the next five years and beyond!

— Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation, Linux Foundation

Oct 08

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Weekend Update: This Week’s Round-up of Remote Blockchain Learning Resources

By Hyperledger Blog, Weekend Update

If you have suggestions for resources or events that we should spotlight in a future Weekend Update, let us know here using #HLWeekendUpdate.

Internet Identity Workshop XXXIII

The Internet Identity Workshop has been finding, probing and solving identity issues twice every year since 2005. At its heart, Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) is a participatory conference, an Open Space unConference. It has no keynotes or panels, so it’s about getting stuff done. All attendees are welcome to call and host or present sessions. No formal presentation is required to host a session. IW XXXIII (30) will take place online from October 12 – 14.

Go here for more details.

Hyperledger In-depth: An hour with ConsenSys – Part one of a series on Hyperledger & Ethereum

ConsenSys is hosting a three-part webinar series focused on educating attendees on various use cases of Ethereum Mainnet and Hyperledger Besu. The series, “Hyperledger & Ethereum: Who Put Peanut Butter in my Jelly?” will go into detail on public mainnet deployments, including interoperability and security challenges to keep in mind. It will also cover DeFi and NFTs as well as recent technical developments.

Tune in for the first session, “Paving the way for enterprises to take the best parts of public mainnet,” on Thursday, October 14, at 8:00 AM Pacific Time. For more information and to register, go here.

Case Study: Ledger Leopard and RTI Blockchain use Hyperledger Besu to make supply chain traceability as easy as online banking

Learn more about how Ledger Leopard used Hyperledger Besu to power a new digital approach to tracking returnable transport items (RTIs) in this new case study.

Virtual Meetups

Wednesday, October 13, at 17:00 UTC / 12:00 CDT: Hyperledger Kansas City hosts “Hyperledger Labs: Private Data Objects (PDO)”
Thursday, October 14, at 15:00 UTC / 17:00 CEST: Hyperledger Budapest hosts “Blockchain Scaling & Interoperability with Perun Framework”
Thursday, October 14, at 16:00 UTC / 12:00 EDT: Hyperledger NYC hosts “Blockchain Interoperability with Hyperledger Cactus & Weaver”
Thursday, October 14, at 22:00 UTC / 17:00 GMT-5: Hyperledger Latinoamerica hosts “Blockchain para el sector GovTech” (Spanish)
Thursday, October 14, at 22:30 UTC / 16:30 MDT: Hyperledger Denver hosts “Blockchain Career Fair Network Series – What’s New In The Blockchain Job Market”

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Oct 06

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Developer showcase series: Matt Zand, author and HashFlow CEO

By Hyperledger Blog, Developer Showcase, Hyperledger Fabric

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Matt Zand, CEO of HashFlow and co-author of Hands-On Smart Contract Development with Hyperledger Fabric V2 by O’Reilly Media

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on, and let us know what was it that made you want to get into blockchain?

I started an IT company in Maryland in 2010. Since then I gradually moved from custom web development to mobile app development services. In 2019, I started exploring blockchain technology and mastered all of its concepts and platforms. In 2020, I decided to write a book on Hyperledger Fabric V2, which came out last week. Beside my book, I have designed several blockchain course curricula and course materials for companies like O’Reilly Media as well as done several blockchain projects for our clients at HashFlow. Lastly, I have done several public speaking sessions in the Hyperledger community in North America and Europe.

What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

NFT for financial products with Hyperledger Fabric, asset tokenization for digital banks with Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, B2B NFT in music industry, a SaaS product for customer loyalty management, healthcare payment system, an ICO product and an internet-connectivity reward system for the telecom industry just to name a few. In addition, my book covers several projects done on Hyperledger Fabric.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?

My advice is to start exploring blockchain concepts and its use cases. Then, try to map a blockchain solution to an existing business problem. In this step, you learn how to design a blockchain system as a solution architect. Finally, pick a platform (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum) and build a demo of your product. After you finish and launch your first blockchain application, you would be able to gradually dig deeper into more advanced blockchain implementations.

What are the main differences between developing blockchain applications in Hyperledger or Ethereum?

While working as CEO at HashFlow, I advise and architect different blockchain solutions based on client requirements and other considerations such as choice of cloud provider, performance, availability, and interoperability. Thus, the choice of platform comes after we design the project architecture. As a rule of thumb, private enterprise performance-sensitive applications are being built with Hyperledger Fabric, whereas public applications like utility tokens are best suited with Ethereum.

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

The most important thing Hyperledger can focus on is increasing the number of transactions per second. It would also be great to have Hyperledger tools and libraries that are currently at incubation stage become active.

As Hyperledger’s incubated projects start maturing and hit 1.0s and beyond, what are the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result from your perspective?

Hyperledger Transact is a really interesting product. We need methods for quickly creating distributed ledger technology (DLT) applications.

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Blockchain is going to solve many problems. However, I am looking forward to seeing more enterprise blockchain projects moving forward from the PoC stage to production.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

I hope to see a robust and prevalent acceptance of Hyperledger DLTs among enterprise projects. Also, I like to see more collaboration on projects like Hyperledger Besu where public and private blockchain developers would be able to collaborate.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

Spend more time on architecting a solution thoroughly than developing it.

What technology could you not live without?

The Internet.

Oct 01

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Weekend Update: This Week’s Round-up of Remote Blockchain Learning Resources

By Hyperledger Blog, Weekend Update

If you have suggestions for resources or events that we should spotlight in a future Weekend Update, let us know here using #HLWeekendUpdate.

Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) Green Shoots Series

The Green Shoots Series, a lead up to the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF), is a collection of online discussions to share practical insights and authentic stories from leading speakers globally. The Green Shoots Series focuses on key issues and topics affecting financial services, technology and public policy.

The next session, which will be on October 6 at 10:00 AM Singapore Standard Time, is part of a series on Digital Currency and will focus on “Standards and Interoperability in the Journey to Ubiquitous Adoption.” The discussion will be moderated by Andrew McCormack of the BIS Innovation Hub in Singapore will include the Linux Foundation’s Brian Behlendorf and Sheila Warren, Head of Data, Blockchain and Digital Assets for the World Economic Forum.

Go here for more details.

New Hyperledger FireFly project

The newest project, Hyperledger FireFly, became official this week. FireFly is a multi-party system for enterprise data flows, meaning it provides a purpose-built system upon which to build decentralized blockchain applications. Contributed by Kaleido to Hyperledger Labs in June 2021, FireFly has an active and growing open source community and is looking for more contributors to get involved in the project.

Find out more here.

Video introduction to using Hyperledger Cactus

Check out this quick video to learn how to create production-ready DLT applications that interact with multiple ledgers with Hyperledger Cactus.

Virtual Meetups

Thursday, October 7, at 9:00 UTC / 18:00 JST: Hyperledger Tokyo hosts “10月7日オンライン開催 Hyperledger Tokyo Meetup” (Japanese)
Thursday, October 7, at 22:00 UTC / 19:00 BRT: Hyperledger Brazil Chapter hosts “Projeto Diário de Bordo Digital da Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil” (Portuguese)

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Oct 01

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Ledger Leopard Uses Hyperledger Besu to Power a Scale-Up’s New Digital Approach to RTI Tracking

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Supply Chain

Most of the products we use and consume every day are transported on Returnable Transport Items (RTI). Durable and reusable, RTIs like crates, pallets and containers allow producers to move goods efficiently and sustainably. However, tracking RTIs is often a logistical nightmare. There are billions of palettes circling around the world, and trillions of total RTIs on the move.

When Milou Klooster joined her family’s Netherlands-based smoked fish company, Vishandel Klooster, she soon discovered how much time, money, and energy her team was wasting on tracking RTIs. When she searched for a solution to this problem, she found there wasn’t any.

She resigned from the company and partnered with consultant Yves du Bois to develop a digital approach to the problem. Together, they founded RTI Blockchain. Their aim: a reliable app that connects all members of the supply chain together in one dashboard and provides a real time overview of the status of their RTIs.

Working with blockchain-as-a-service company Ledger Leopard, they developed the RTI Dashboard—a simple and reliable way to manage load carrier administration. Using blockchain technology, the RTI Dashboard gives poolers, suppliers, shippers, and receivers real time insights on their RTI data and enables them to share information privately and transparently. Every link in the supply chain is connected, and the interface is as intuitive as mobile banking.

When it came time to consider a platform, the Ledger Leopard team first considered Ethereum Liberty because it allows for private transactions. Then they considered Hyperledger Fabric. They also considered a combination of Ethereum and Hyperledger.

Ultimately, they chose Hyperledger Besu, an open source Ethereum client for developing enterprise applications that need secure, high-performance transaction processing in a private network.

One key goal was making sure the RTI Dashboard was as easy and intuitive as online banking. Users don’t need to know anything about blockchain to use it. Registration for all users is free. There is no subscription fee, no maintenance and support fees, no cost whatsoever for users. Senders pay per item they ship over the platform at a rate of 0.0005 euros per item.

Once a company registers in RTI Dashboard, they can invite their partners to join with a link. Once the partner clicks on the link, they’re invited to explore the platform and how it works, all at no charge.

RTI Blockchain suggests users start small. “Take one supplier and use RTI Dashboard for all transactions. Once they see what the system can do for them, they’re more willing to move their entire RTI administration process to the system,” says co-founder Yves du Bois.

Hyperledger worked with RTI Blockchain and Ledger Leopard on a case study that details the goals and approach for building this solution, the growing feature set that users are helping to shape and the next opportunities the start-up is eyeing for this dashboard.

Read the full case study here. For more details, tune into the Wednesday, October 20, discussion with Olivier Rikken of Ledger Leopard on supply chain traceability.

Sep 29

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Cactus-samples – Business Logic Plugins for Cactus

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Cactus, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

The Hyperledger Mentorship Program is a structured hands-on learning opportunity for new developers who may otherwise lack the opportunity to gain exposure to Hyperledger open source development and entry to the technical community. These Mentorship Spotlights highlight the work done by the Mentors and the Mentees as part of their program participation. Learn more here.

Mentorship Project Title	Cactus-samples – Business Logic Plugins for Cactus
Description	To build Open Digital Asset Protocol as a business plugin of Hyperledger Cactus to standardize cross chain transaction
Status	COMPLETED
Difficulty	HIGH
Additional Details	Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Tzu-Shen Wang

Texas A&M University

“Throughout this great experience, I’ve learned how to write cleaner code and develop in a test-driven fashion. Moreover, I learned the concept of blockchain interoperability and developed a standardized way to create atomic cross-chain transactions. Furthermore, I found that the Hyperledger open source community is quite friendly and people there are always willing to help. So do not hesitate to ask your questions! Lastly, big thanks to all my mentors. I would not be able to accomplish things without them.”

Mentor(s)

Peter Somogyvari

Accenture

Rafael Belchior

Técnico Lisboa

Peter Somogyvari
“Being a mentor on this project exposed me to academic paper collaboration as well as the implementation work itself. It provided me with an expanded view of possibilities for future collaborations, and I am lucky to have been a participant.

This project has also given me more information about how people interact with Hyperledger Cactus when they are new to it. This is very valuable for me as a Hyperledger Cactus maintainer given that our top priority is to grow the open source software community around the project.

Jason did an excellent job, and I hope to work with him again in the future.”

Rafael Belchior
“In this mentorship, we took a research-oriented approach to help to solve cross-jurisdiction asset transfers by building on top of Hyperledger Cactus. Jason, our mentee, excelled at understanding and implementing a real-world protocol that aims to solve such problem, the Open Digital Asset Protocol – a protocol being discussed at the Internet Engineering Task Force. This way, Jason directly contributed to the state of the art of blockchain interoperability.”

A special thanks to the Hyperledger member companies for funding this important program. To learn more about our Hyperledger Mentorship Program and how you can participate in our next cohort, head over to our program overview page on the Hyperledger wiki.

Sep 28

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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!