Blog Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Feb 08

Project Services Update: Ensuring Hyperledger Projects and Labs have Access to the Tools and Services They Need to Grow

By Ry Jones and David Boswell, Community Architects Blog, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner

The Hyperledger Foundation offers a strong backbone of services and tools to open source projects in the blockchain ecosystem. These are built to sustain projects’ needs for growth and adoption and extend beyond just code management and technical decisions. When developers start a new project or a new lab at the Hyperledger Foundation, we want to make sure that they will be successful and regularly improving the tools and services they have access to is a big part of that.

Like many enterprise open source communities, over the years Hyperledger Foundation staff has worked with project maintainers and the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) to assess tools and services and make them available to the community. These project services are regularly reviewed and updated as community requirements change and projects mature.

Just as open source development continues to evolve, so too do the many tools used to support the projects. For example, over 20 years ago in the early years of open source, launching a project might have included setting up an IRC server for chat, putting the code on a CVS server and setting up Bugzilla to track bugs and issues Developer tools improve rapidly, and communities use a whole new set of tools today. We need to keep adapting as things evolve to serve our projects. We did this last year when the Chat Task Force reviewed the chat tool we were using at the time and they recommended a move to Discord to provide a better experience to community members.

We’ve started this year by reviewing the available tools and services and seeing where we need to bring in something better or add something new. This post will explain the recent changes we’ve been making.

Recommended List of Developer Tools

We’ve created a new page on the Hyperledger wiki that documents all of the tools that are available. This page breaks the available options down into a set of categories to help developers and maintainers make decisions about what tools to use. This includes a recommended set of tools to use for documentation, continuous integration, artifact storage, communication and issue tracking. In the past, this information hasn’t been as clear as it could be and we want to save people the time of evaluating a range of tools on their own when we have done that work and can offer our guidance.

There are tools we offer beyond the recommended tools that are available to address other specific needs. To help give guidance for all tools, we’ve clearly documented which tools we plan to provide on a long-term basis as well as those we may not be able to support past the short term for a variety of factors. We also specify tools we currently offer while we work to move projects to better tools as well as tools we used to provide but no longer do.

The set of legacy tools in the community reflect that Hyperledger was founded in 2015 and many of the tools we’ve relied on in the past now have better alternatives. For one example, we have been using Azure Pipelines but anticipate it will be replaced by Github Actions in the near future.

Additional Resources for Documentation and Translation

Documentation is critical to the health and success of open source projects. However, this is an area that can get overlooked when talking about tools and services since the focus is often on how to help developers create the code instead of document it. We’ve been looking at ways to help get more documentation activity happening in the community and have some ideas we are going to try this year.

Our annual Mentorship program is a prime opportunity to bring more people into the community to work on documentation for projects and labs. Last year a mentee helped develop documentation for Hyperledger Cacti that was delivered in the Blockchain Interoperability with Hyperledger Cacti workshop in November. Based on the success of that project, we are reserving several spots in the 2023 program for documentation related efforts. If you are involved in a project or lab and would like to work with a mentee who can help you improve existing docs or add new docs, then consider signing up as a mentor. The call for projects and mentors is underway.

Translating documentation into other languages is also a key part of making this information available to everyone who wants to use or learn about a project. Only around 20% of the world’s population speaks English so, if we provide our content only in English, it dramatically limits who is able to get involved with using or contributing. We have had some success with community members translating content, such as Hyperledger Fabric documentation, into other languages. In the process, we learned that we could benefit from tools that are specifically focused on helping people with their translations. We are looking into other options this year and welcome feedback about what people would recommend or find useful.

Exploring Other Changes Around Accessibility and Security

Later this year we’ll also be looking into ways to provide more services around security and accessibility. On the list: ways to improve the existing process for running security audits, expand the bug bounty program to more projects and help for rolling out security best practices. We also want to make sure that as many people as possible can use our tools and are not running into barriers, so we plan to conduct an accessibility audit. The audit will help us identify areas where we can make improvements that enable more people to take part in the community.

If you have questions about any of this or would like to suggest additional tools and services for us to take a look at, feel free to reach out. And, if you’re a maintainer of a project or lab and would like to talk more about how to get help using any of this for the development you’re doing, let us know. You can reach out to us at community-architects at hyperledger dot org.

Feb 02

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IPwe Launches Revolutionary Platform and Deployment of 25 Million Patent NFTs on Hybrid Casper Blockchain and Hyperledger Fabric Network

By Mia Mixan, IPwe, and Matt Coolidge, Casper Labs Blog, Hyperledger Cacti, Hyperledger Fabric, Interoperability

IPwe’s President Leann Pinto, along with Casper Labs’ Medha Parlikar and Hyperledger Foundation’s Daniela Barbosa, took to the stage at the Blockchain Hub in Davos to announce IPwe’s deployment of 25 million patent NFTs concurrently with the launch of IPwe’s Smart Intangible Asset Management (SIAM) solution.

The Use Case for Blockchain and Intellectual Property

IPwe is revolutionizing the intellectual property (IP) system using blockchain. Intangible assets represent 90% of the S&P 500’s value, but patents, a large percentage of those intangibles, are underutilized and undervalued[1]. There are approximately 25 million active patents worldwide, but the asset owners generally misunderstand their holdings, causing low utilization and commercialization rates, including financing, due to a lack of transparency and standardized asset valuation metrics that asset classes have[2]. This amounts to over $1 trillion in lost IP opportunities annually[3].

Blockchain-based technologies, specifically NFTs, allows patent data to be managed efficiently and securely by consolidating it into a single digital wrapper representing the asset. Beyond that, blockchain further enables smart contracts, meaning that when specific contractual events occur, the smart contracts directly read from the blockchain and automatically trigger a predefined reaction, making human intervention no longer necessary. Smart contracts create efficiency and transparency and enable micro-transactions, such as small-volume patent licensing deals, to be economically viable for businesses for the first time. They alleviate suffocating by transaction costs. Furthermore, trails of evidence on the blockchain safeguard that every action and smart contract automation can be audited properly.

Blockchain Meets IP: How IPwe is Changing the Game with Hybrid Casper Blockchain and Hyperledger Fabric Network

IPwe is leveraging blockchain technology to transform the IP landscape by tokenizing the majority of the world’s patents as patent NFTs, referred to as IPwe Digital Assets, representing the largest enterprise blockchain NFT deployment in history. These 25 million IPwe Digital Assets store verifiable ownership data and auditable, compliant records for each patent, allowing enterprises to confidently manage their IP in the next-generation Web3 ecosystem. Additionally, IPwe Digital Assets are populated with public data from leading patent datasets, providing IP owners with a transparent digital representation of asset ownership. With verified data about each patent stored on NFTs, transactions can happen faster than ever before because enterprises no longer have to spend weeks or months manually verifying patent data, and smart contracts will trigger the transactions automatically.

Watch IPwe, Casper Labs, and Hyperledger Foundation announce the world’s largest enterprise blockchain deployment at the Blockchain Hub in Davos

Hybrid Casper Blockchain and Hyperledger Fabric Network

In September 2022, Casper Labs and IPwe developed and launched a dynamic NFT blockchain solution, IPwe Digital Assets. The solution uses the permissioned distributed ledger technologies of open source Hyperledger Fabric and the public Casper Blockchain to securely store verified public and private information about each patent. The integration capitalizes on the data security and trust inherent on a Hyperledger Fabric network and enables Casper to securely bring assets locked on the private ledger to the public chain.

Why A Hybrid Network Approach

A hybrid blockchain combines the capabilities of private and public blockchains, taking advantage of each. The private blockchain offers secure, permissioned data storage—an essential feature that’s particularly crucial for highly regulated industries. Meanwhile, the public blockchain brings scale and immutability, enabling a more open and transparent ledger.

To showcase the potential of a hybrid network, Casper Labs and IBM recently performed the first atomic cross-chain swap of fungible and non-fungible tokens between an instance of a Hyperledger Fabric permissioned network and the Casper Blockchain.They used a Hyperledger Lab, Weaver, to achieve the cross-chain functionality. (Weaver is now part of Hyperledger Cacti.) The result was a hybrid blockchain, uniquely equipped with the enhanced security of a consortium network running Hyperledger Fabric and the public verifiability and open market access offered by the Casper public blockchain.

The Significance of IPwe’s 25 Million Patent NFTs

Beyond just tokenizing patents, IPwe provides a solution called Smart Intangible Asset Management (SIAM), a comprehensive SaaS tool for IP valuation and management. By reading from the patents NFTs, IPwe’s advanced AI algorithms determine a benchmark value for each IPwe Digital Asset and IP portfolio, providing enterprises with unrivaled insights and enabling smarter and more informed business decisions.

One of the key benefits of IPwe Digital Assets is the ability to aggregate data for more efficient management and analysis by storing all relevant data in one location, readily accessible on the blockchain from anywhere. Typically, patent data is not kept in one central repository but is highly fractionalized across multiple public and private databases, causing enterprises to spend weeks verifying their own patent data. Another advantage of IPwe Digital Assets is data verification, as the data stored on the NFT becomes more valuable once verified. When adding data points to an IPwe Digital Asset, IPwe and other third parties confirm its level of trustworthiness, such as whether all existing “public” records show the same owner for a patent. Private asset data is also an important aspect of the NFT. IPwe’s goal is to ensure that enterprises will be able to add all current private data to their IPwe Digital Assets – not just who owns it, but who is licensing it, who is commercializing it, who is financing it. All this information can be used to confirm the asset’s true value.

Conclusion

In conclusion, using a hybrid Casper Blockchain and Hyperledger Fabric network, IPwe is deploying 25 million patent NFTs, the largest enterprise blockchain deployment in history. On top of that, IPwe’s SIAM solution allows enterprises to fully utilize these patent NFTs to transact, manage, and value their IP. This revolutionary implementation of blockchain technology will enable IPwe to bring liquidity to the IP space, where currently approximately 95% of IP assets are not transacted or commercialized[4].

Join IPwe’s upcoming webinar on February 8th to learn more about this revolutionary SaaS platform and how IPwe aims to transform the IP landscape and bring liquidity into the market by tokenizing patents as NFTs.

[1] https://ipcloseup.com/2021/01/19/latest-data-show-that-intangible-assets-comprise-90-of-the-value-of-the-sp-500-companies/
[2] https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-943-2022-en-wipo-ip-facts-and-figures-2022.pdf
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/06/18/13633/?sh=4bdf734b6f1c
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/06/18/13633/?sh=4bdf734b6f1c

Jan 31

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KrypC builds award-winning taXchain to streamline EU tax forms using Hyperledger Fabric

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric

Read the full case study here.

Everyone agrees that doing business in the EU creates a mountain of paperwork. Many forms deal with customs, duties, and taxes across the 27 EU members and with trading partners in other countries.

Filling out all these forms demands a lot of resources. And missed opportunities pile up when overloaded staff don’t claim the exemptions they’re entitled to under various trade treaties.

Take, as an example, the Long Term Supplier Declaration (LTSD), which certifies the materials and country of origin for any product or material. This form must be updated by every supplier every 24 months. More than 80% of these forms are still handled on paper, creating a huge risk of honest mistakes and deliberate fraud.

Every year, Siemens AG exchanges about 10,000 of these forms with suppliers at an estimated cost of €120 to €150 for completing each paper-based LTSD form. That means handling a single EU customs form on paper costs Siemens more than a million Euros a year.

The Digital Tax Transformation at Siemens teamed up with colleagues at Henkel to see if they could use blockchain technology to make the processes smoother, faster, more secure, and more transparent. Their aim was to

Prove that digitized tax forms save time and money
Build an open, flexible platform that can support many partners
Showcase the network to companies across the EU

They opted for Hyperledger Fabric as the platform because it is built for permissioned networks, with good security and privacy, and strong community support. It took a team of Microsoft developers in Europe just three days to build a working prototype that could handle an LTSD form on-screen instead of on paper. Right away, the benefits were obvious. Before, the complicated paper-bound process took days, if not weeks. Now, thanks to pull-down lists and tax codes, the LTSD forms never need to be printed. If both buyer and seller use the new system, a whole form can be done in minutes, with far less risk of errors or fraud.

To build out the full blockchain network, Microsoft recommended KrypC, an experienced solution provider that was already operating several other networks built with Hyperledger Fabric. KrpyC built taXchain, a very flexible network where any member can run their own node or use a managed node; write their own APIs or have those written for them; and process a small, medium, or large number of tax forms.

The LTSD form is now running on the network, linked to a database of 7,000 possible materials. APIs link the network to an SAP pilot system at Siemens. The blockchain stands ready to record and certify precise data based on each LTSD, in a tamper-proof format that government authorities and trading partners can trust.

In a huge vote of confidence for its innovative design, taXchain recently won the prestigious Taxcellence award from Handelsblatt, a renowned financial newspaper in Germany.

The Hyperledger Foundation team worked with KrypC and Siemens on a case study that details the planning and development of taXchain as well as next steps for growing the network. It also highlights the long-term opportunity to transform the traditional chore of processing B2B taxes from a cost center to a profit center.

Read the full case study here.

Jan 25

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Solang Solidity Compiler optimizations and error handling

By Salaheldin Soliman Blog, Hyperledger Mentorship Program, Hyperledger Solang

What did you work on?

Project name: Solang Solidity Compiler optimizations and error handling

Introduction: What is Hyperledger Solang?

Hyperledger Solang is a Solidity compiler for Solana and Substrate written in Rust that utilizes LLVM as the backend. It can be considered the first solid initiative towards making Solidity available for non-EVM chains, while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum’s Solidity compiler: Solc.

Chapter 1: Applying for the Hyperledger mentorship

I found out through a friend that Hyperledger Foundation hosts mentorships for open-source projects related to blockchain infrastructure, which has been my main interest since it covers a whole lot of different Computer Science topics (Distributed systems, cryptography, networking, etc.). As I scrolled through the presented projects, I found a Hyperledger Solang mentorship project addressing three issues:

Make multiplication overflow detection during runtime work above a certain bit-width.
Improve the efficiency (gas cost or compute units) of array bounds checks.
Improve Solang’s parser resilience.

The first issue intrigued me personally. I was working on a De-fi app, using Remix Solc compiler version 0.7.6 that didn’t have runtime overflow checking. The lack thereof was causing a function to misbehave and consumed me a few valuable days to dig into the issue I was facing. The debugging process was captivating and motivated me to go further in understanding how overflow checking works. Although the problem was fixed on later versions of Solc, I saw in the mentorship an opportunity to improve my knowledge about the topic.

I contacted Sean Young and Lucas Steuernagel, the mentors, and discussed some questions I had about the compiler. They were really helpful along the way.

Chapter 2: Getting warmed up

I was new to contributing to open source, didn’t have any experience with Rust and didn’t use Git quite often 🙂 I spent the first three weeks of my mentorship exploring the source code and deciding on what issue to start working on. Since it would give me a broader idea of the code base, I started with the array bounds optimization, whose goal was to decrease the number of instructions when checking if an array indexation is done within its length limits. More details about my work are available both in Solang’s documentation and in the pull request that addresses this.

In my first pull request, my mentors pointed out issues on how I was solving the task and raised many problems with my Rust programming style. I was clearly struggling with it. If you are learning Rust, do not take my approach of “learn by doing.” Please go to the Rust Book, read it, and try out the examples there. It will take some time in the beginning, but the examples will teach you the correct programming concepts. This is the only thing I regret not doing at the beginning of the mentorship.

After that PR was merged, I took some time to read Understanding Ownership and Smart Pointers chapters in the Rust book. That improved my code over the following PRs.

Chapter 3: Multiplication Overflow Detection

The issue at the core of this project was that there was no multiplication overflow detection for integers wider than 64 bits. There are some facts to consider before solving such a problem:

LLVM introduces a set of intrinsics for arithmetic operations. The catch here is that there are no intrinsics for multiplication with overflow for integers wider than 64 bits, so we have to implement our own.
Solidity was designed for the EVM, which supports bit widths up to 256, and bit sizes of multiples of 8 (int128, int136, etc…). On the other hand, Solang compiles for BPF/WASM, and there is no inherent support for types bigger than 64 bits.

Given these two facts, Solang handled multiplication of larger bit widths by first rounding the value to the nearest 32 bits, then splitting the operands bits into chunks of 32 bits and performing long multiplication.

The multiplication of N bit values will result in at most 2N bit values. So overflow checking was done by assessing whether the uppermost N bits contain any set bits, and raising a runtime error if there are any. Signed multiplication overflow was done first by doing unsigned multiplication, then checking the result for an unexpected change in the sign.

Solang interfaces with LLVM using Inkwell crate. Basically, all of the above was written as Rust code that generates LLVM-IR with the desired logic.

What did you learn or accomplish?

If one is in a mainly learning position, a mentorship, do not pinpoint your vision on completing the task. Instead, take some time and do some background readings in order to tie stuff together. For instance, the aforementioned issue needs some background readings on LLVM, and why Solang used Inkwell instead of LLVM’s C API.
One cannot develop resilient code without random testing.

Chapter 4: Improving Solang’s parser resilience.

Solang utilizes LALRPOP, a parser generator, for its parser. The problem was that once a parser or lexical error was found, the parser would throw an error and stop. If there are multiple errors in a Solidity file, the programmer will only see the first one.

I have utilized LALRPOP’s error recovery documentation to add new grammar rules to account for errors, in such a way that the parser returns multiple errors which makes coding easier.

Some messages for future mentees:

When in daily/weekly meetings with your mentors, do not focus on reporting what you have done. Try to focus more on what they have done, even if you do not understand immediately or have nothing to add to the conversation. This will give you a broader vision of the project and its future plans, in addition to benefiting from their knowledge in the field.
Do not take code comments personally. Remember that the goal is to learn from a more experienced person. They are criticizing your code, not you 🙂 It is also useful to review your own code multiple times before asking for reviews.
You will grow muscles, as in becoming a better software engineer. You will know how the open source community works and gain a new set of technical and communication skills.

What comes next?

For the next six months, I will continue working on Hyperledger Solang through a Web3 Foundation grant with a focus on improving the Solang developer experience. Also, my team and I will continue our thesis project (a cross chain wallet), making sure it is production ready by the end of the next Spring semester. For the long term, I will continue working on blockchain infrastructure-related projects.

Jan 25

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: GVCR: Secure Verifiable Credential Registries (VCR) for GitHub & GitLab

By Sarvesh Shinde Blog, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Mentorship Program, Hyperledger Ursa, Identity

What did you work on?

Project name: GVCR: Secure Verifiable Credential Registries (VCR) for GitHub & GitLab

My name is Sarvesh Shinde and this is my personal blog that I’m writing to share my experience of working on the GVCR Project. A little background about the project is really necessary to fully appreciate the objectives of this project.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a digital identity management model in which an individual or a company has the exclusive ownership over their accounts and personal data. A verifiable credential protocol, in turn, forms one of the three pillars of Self-Sovereign Identity, along with the Decentralized Identifiers protocol (DIDs) and Distributed Ledger Technology (or blockchain).

This project was conceptualized to provision secure verifiable credential registries that utilize Github’s data model and API to offer exactly the same APIs for any other verifiable credential registry. This project exists as an extension to the DRMan project.

The DRMan project, inspired by the SDKMan, acts as a tool for managing multiple versions of different software development libraries. These libraries form the necessary dependencies for the extended feature modules that reside inside DRMan, including GVCR.

What did you learn or accomplish?

GVCR, along with DRMan, is a command line utility. This project has been entirely written in shell script. Shell script has a distinct advantage of making the tool light weight, easy to install and to use.

As of now, GVCR has been provisioned to utilize Github and Gitlab as its two git based registries. The plugin architecture of GVCR allows it to provision for more VCRs in the relative future. The APIs of these individual git based registries are designed to be a collection of facade functions that provide the same feature on the surface, all the while accommodating for the individual data models of the specific registry under the hood.

GVCR can be utilized in an Hyperledger Aries Framework as an implementation of VCR and collaborates with existing Agent and Wallet open source projects in Hyperledger Aries. It can also be used in Hyperledger Indy projects by providing endpoints of cryptographic verifications for credential issuers.

In near future, GVCR is envisioned to leverage Hyperledger Ursa to implement encryption, decryption and verification functions for verifiable credentials.

I was responsible for the design and implementation of this very GVCR module.

Now coming to the topic of the mentorship program itself, let me give you a rundown of its structure, working mechanism and decision making process. This mentorship was a careful balance of a hands-off approach towards the design planning and realization part that I undertook and the existence of biweekly meetings that acted as an efficient feedback mechanism from the mentors. These biweekly meetings were really efficient in setting the tempo of the progress and made sure that all the involved participants were aware of their individual tasks at hand.

The mentorship started on June 1st and continued until November 16th. Further, the mentorship was broken into two halves. In general, the first half was more focused on the design aspect of this project while the second half came down to its implementation.

What comes next?

Overall, this mentorship has been a wonderful experience and has enabled me to pursue my career in blockchain. The future of a secure, verifiable digital identity and its co-operability with a decentralized ledger brings a new outlook to the future of digital identity and just how important its acceptance is to finally realizing the ultimate goal of exclusively owning our own identities. New technologies are constantly coming up to make this future a reality, and I’m looking forward to contributing my part towards it.

Jan 20

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Blockchain Network Operation in a Decentralized Way

By Xichen Pan Blog, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

What did you work on?

Project name: Blockchain Network Operation in a Decentralized Way

My Hyperledger Foundation mentorship project, which focused on Hyperledger Cello, gave me the opportunity to work on the development of an operational dashboard for deployed blockchains. Our goal was to make it easier for users to create, manage, and use blockchains, and to reduce the difficulty and complexity of these tasks.

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of industries, from finance and healthcare to supply chain management and beyond. However, for many users, the complexity of blockchain systems can be a barrier to entry. Hyperledger Cello aims to change that by developing an easy-to-use operational dashboard that allows users to manage their blockchain networks more flexibly and safely.

What did you learn or accomplish?

During my time on the project, I was fortunate to have Baohua Yang and Yang Feng as my mentors. Under their supervision, I implemented the backend APIs for node operations in the blockchain network using Django and also developed the frontend UI for channel and node operations. In addition to these technical contributions, I also became familiar with the Hyperledger Cello deployment using Docker through editing, enriching, and fixing the current project documentation. These efforts will help to make Hyperledger Cello more user friendly and easier to use.

In addition to the technical skills I gained during my work on Hyperledger Cello, I also had the chance to learn more about the broader context of blockchain technology and its potential to solve real-world problems. I was able to see firsthand the benefits of a decentralized, transparent, and secure system for storing and sharing data, and I am excited to continue exploring the possibilities of this technology.

What comes next?

Looking ahead, I plan to continue contributing to Hyperledger Cello and to learn as much as I can about blockchain technology. I am also interested in finding a job that is related to cryptocurrency and blockchain, where I can use my skills and knowledge to make a positive impact. Hyperledger Cello is making great progress, and I am proud to be a part of the project. I am looking forward to seeing what the future holds for this exciting technology and its potential to transform industries and solve complex problems.

Jan 20

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Optimizing the pipelines using Github Actions for Caliper and Caliper-Benchmarks

By Rinish Sam Blog, Hyperledger Caliper, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

What did you work on?

Project name: Optimizing the pipelines using Github Actions for Caliper and Caliper-Benchmarks

Hyperledger Caliper is a general-purpose benchmarking tool for distributed systems like DLTs with scalable workload generation, declarative workload definitions and comprehensive data analysis capabilities. The Caliper and Caliper-Benchmarks repositories had build systems to verify pull requests by running unit and integration tests and to deploy the latest packages to NPM and DockerHub. The objective of the project was to optimize the pipelines and reduce the build times to improve the experience of developers contributing to Caliper. The project was split into three phases:

Migrate the Caliper repository from using Azure pipelines to GitHub Actions.
Optimize the builds for Caliper and Caliper-Benchmarks.
Enhance the builds of Caliper and Caliper-Benchmarks with new features.

I would like to thank my mentor David Kelsey from IBM for the guidance throughout the mentorship project.

What did you learn or accomplish?

Project-related learnings:

I developed a good understanding of how Hyperledger Caliper works and, in general, how a benchmarking system is designed.
I explored various ways of setting up a Hyperledger Fabric system from scratch.
I learnt about various techniques to write unit tests in JavaScript.
I explored various approaches for collecting metrics from a distributed system.

Miscellaneous learnings:

I learnt about effectively breaking down a project into tasks and tracking them.
I gained a lot of insight into the inner workings of Hyperledger Fabric from the discussions with my mentor.
I got to discuss the recent developments in Fabric and the Fabric ecosystem with my mentor.

Accomplishments:

The Caliper repositories no longer depend on Azure pipelines.
The repository was migrated from lerna to NPM workspaces.
The total time taken for the build pipelines were reduced by 60%.
The pipelines only execute the tests of components that have been modified by a pull request.

The improvements in build times throughout the project:

What comes next?

In terms of the project,

The build times could be further reduced by switching to a lightweight Hyperledger Fabric deployment like Microfab.
Other miscellaneous improvements to the repository workflows like Dependabot could be integrated.

Personally,

I plan on continuing to contribute added features to Hyperledger Caliper. I started working on new features towards the end of the mentorship.
I also plan on being active in the Hyperledger community, attending various contributor meetings.

Jan 18

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Enable Kubernetes Operators support for Fablo

By Great Umegbewe Nwebedu Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Labs, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

What did you work on?

Project name: Enable Kubernetes Operators support for Fablo

Hello, I’m Great Umegbewe. I am currently a sophomore studying Computer Science at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. During the fall of 2022, I had the chance to work on Fablo, a Hyperledger Lab, as part of the Hyperledger Mentorship Program. I was mentored by Jakub Dzikowski and Piotr Hejwowski and found the experience to be both valuable and enjoyable. This blog post will share some of my insights from this experience.

Fablo is a simple tool to generate a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network from a config file and run it on Docker. Its main goal is to provide a super-easy start with Hyperledger Fabric. It uses a declarative approach to define components in a network, in a single file named fablo-config.json. This where users can define channels, chaincodes, organizations and engines (Docker or Kubernetes). Before I came in, only Docker was supported as an engine. I worked on adding support for Kubernetes.

Example of a fablo-config.json file

{
  "$schema": "https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/fablo/releases/download/1.1.0/schema.json",
  "global": {
    "fabricVersion": "2.4.0",
    "tls": false,
    "engine": "kubernetes",
    "peerDevMode": false
  },
  "orgs": [
    {
      "organization": {
        "name": "Orderer",
        "domain": "orderer.example.com"
      },
      "orderers": [
        {
          "groupName": "group1",
          "type": "solo",
          "instances": 1
        }
      ],
      "tools": {}
    },
    {
      "organization": {
        "name": "Org1",
        "domain": "org1.example.com"
      },
      "peer": {
        "instances": 2,
        "db": "LevelDb"
      },
      "tools": {}
    }  ],
  "channels": [
    {
      "name": "my-channel1",
      "orgs": [
        {
          "name": "Org1",
          "peers": [
            "peer0",
            "peer1"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "chaincodes": [
    {
      "name": "chaincode1",
      "version": "0.0.1",
      "lang": "node",
      "channel": "my-channel1",
      "directory": "./chaincodes/chaincode-kv-node"
    }
  ]
}

What did you learn or accomplish?

Before the mentorship, I had previous experience working with Kubernetes and Bash, but none with Hyperledger Fabric. This mentorship helped me learn about Hyperledger Fabric and its components. It also taught me a whole lot about open source software and how the work of a maintainer isn’t that easy.

Hats off to Jakob Dzikowski and Piotr Hejwowski. They are really amazing maintainers and mentors.

To contribute to Fablo, I needed to learn how Fablo worked and understand Hyperledger Fabric. Again my mentors were very helpful with this.

I initially started by defining the various components on yaml’s with the images of peers, CAs, etc. This worked in one direction, but was daunting and had several problems. Luckily, Hyperledger had a Kubernetes Operator hlf-operator with a kubectl plugin that managed all aspects from the deployments, statefulsets and persistent volumes. With this abstraction what was left is to:

Write the shell scripts wrapped around the operator plugin to accommodate the required components (channels, chaincodes, CAs, peers).
Add support for Kubernetes engine in the fablo-config.
Template the shell scripts.
Create a snapshot and unit testing.

What comes next?

This has been a valuable experience. I was really challenged and my skills have improved so much. For the foreseeable future, I will continue working on Fablo and other open source projects. Big thanks to my mentors. Hopefully, I will become a maintainer for Fablo too.

Jan 18

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Technical Deep Dive Workshop Content Creation for Hyperledger Cactus

By Mónica Gomez Blog, Hyperledger Cacti, Hyperledger Mentorship Program, Interoperability

What did you work on?

Project name: Technical Deep Dive Workshop Content Creation for Hyperledger Cactus

My work on the Technical Deep Dive Workshop Content Creation for Hyperledger Cactus mentorship project was focused on delivering a three-hour long course in both English and Portuguese on the Hyperledger Cacti tool. This pluggable blockchain interoperability framework was recently merged from Hyperledger Cactus and Weaver, a Hyperledger Lab, and it enables a link between networks built on heterogeneous distributed ledgers. With its architecture, Cacti allows for a flexible and extensible development environment for DTL solutions.

Developing the workshop required a vast study of the background technology and the tool itself as well as how it connected to other projects of the Hyperledger ecosystem. I must thank my mentors, Peter Somogyvari and Rafael Belchior, for guiding me in my study of the technology and Cacti implementations. They were valuable resources for helping me construct content that will help the Hyperledger community to understand the Hyperledger Cacti tool better and more easily integrate it in their endeavors.

What did you learn or accomplish?

During my mentorship project, I had the opportunity to engage Hyperledger Cacti developers, allowing me to study and contribute to a highly organized and optimized repository. It taught me how work is done in a fast-paced, open source environment and how all the pieces are carefully thought through and put together. It was truly exciting to be working with cutting-edge technology in the blockchain industry and see the efforts being made by the Hyperledger community to assure that it is accessible and helpful in shaping the technology’s future.

What comes next?

After this experience, I certainly hope to work with blockchain in my future career. I’ll take this experience in open source blockchain development and apply it to my master’s degree thesis and personal projects. It will be a great contribution to the start of my career, both technical and community wise.

Jan 13

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Driving new markets: The opportunities ahead for enterprise blockchain technologies

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

While volatility reigned supreme in 2022, here at Hyperledger Foundation we are looking ahead with great excitement to what is possible in 2023. When CEOs of companies like Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon are penning articles on the long-term value of distributed ledger and blockchain technology, we know the work our community is doing is building markets and creating opportunities. Hyperledger Foundation has been at the forefront of advancing open-source technologies that are transforming the way businesses operate. Since 2016, organizations around the world have been deploying these technologies to optimize speed, security, efficiency and trust in global markets and industries.

Blockchain’s value has already been established in a number of enterprise use cases: provenance tracking, logistics, cross border payments and more, where it is adding efficiency and cutting costs, while saving time and labor. One such proven example is the application of Hyperledger technologies in the partnership between MineHub and KrypC that has utilized Hyperledger Fabric to drastically improve upon the infrastructure necessary to power the supply chain of the mining industry. GSBN has also built a Global Trade Operating Platform with Hyperledger Fabric as the foundation. The historical lack of on-demand data in the shipping industry left the supply chain vulnerable to disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic. But with a single, efficient, immutable source of on-demand data, such disruptions can be dealt with much more effectively.

Now, there are a number of new and increasingly interesting markets and applications, especially tied to digital assets and tokenization, that are moving to the forefront of this market. The traditional infrastructure that powers the global financial system is slow, especially in comparison to the benefits blockchain technology provides. While data and information can already traverse the globe in seconds or less, value is not yet fully capable of moving at this speed or with the same efficiency. Although assets may appear to move instantaneously with the various online financial tools currently at our disposal, the movement of value itself is still quite slow. Settlement time for transactions still takes days and requires very expensive and lengthy processes in order to complete transactions properly.

Blockchain technology’s ability to alleviate friction in our current regulatory, financial and operational systems is in its capabilities as a piece of highly effective transactional and record keeping machinery. Anything can be bought, sold, transferred and accounted for on a blockchain, with data pertaining to those transactions stored on a distributed and immutable ledger for everyone included in the network to see. Asset tokenization enables the purchase, sale and exchange of digital assets, representative of potentially any asset, traditional or otherwise. This process facilitates the transfer of off-chain real-world assets’ economic value and ownership onto the blockchain.

By accelerating and improving the fractionalization of new asset classes, tokenization will expand the range of available and acceptable collateral beyond traditional assets. Tokenized representations of traditional assets such as cash, bonds, securities and equities, and even physical commodities like gold, stand to be a crucial evolution that will underpin future market infrastructure, just as computerized ledgers were transformational to the previous paper-based generation.

The progress made possible by distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) has enabled a much more capable and comprehensive system to verify assets and track their value. The foundational code of digital smart contracts, which automate the execution of an agreement between parties, are central to enabling this progress. Codified to self-verify and self-execute, smart contracts scale down on the time, formality and costs associated with traditional methods, without compromising on authenticity or credibility. In the past, banks have had to commit robust teams to uphold transactions from client to client, processing each piece of data manually and redirecting value as necessary. With smart contracts, that process occurs automatically, making them more effective and efficient than any traditional centralized entity while also fostering trust and presenting more transparent governance.

The key to widespread adoption of new, automated systems as the rails for widespread, cross-market transactions is creating a trusted technology infrastructure. At Hyperledger Foundation, we believe that open, shared development of the foundational technologies are central to meeting diverse business, consumer, and regulatory needs. Only through the application of open-development and open-source DLTs can we create trusted technology to serve as the backbones for these new financial systems.

Asset tokenization on open-source, open-governed distributed ledgers offers a solution to much of the inherent economic friction of the current global economy and has the potential to unlock a staggering amount of value. And the work has already begun. Using its new tokenization platform, Goldman Sachs arranged a €100 million two-year digital bond for the European Investment Bank with two other banks, all based on a private blockchain. Using traditional financial instruments, it would take a bond sale like this roughly five days to settle. It took just 60 seconds when tokenized on a private blockchain. Reducing settlement time will lower costs across the entire market for banks, customers and even regulators, making markets incredibly more efficient.

The use cases for this technology extend into the public sector as well. Hyperledger’s DLTs have been at the forefront of innovation and tokenization in the global exploration and development of Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs. Our DLTs are built in the open, with vendor neutral governance and can be deployed in several production networks across sectors, including Central Banks. Central bank money traditionally takes the form of cash or reserves held by eligible financial institutions at the central bank. CBDCs, on the other hand, are a newly developed concept that could become a third version of a national currency that is tokenized and would rely on use of an electronic record or digital token to represent the digital form of a nation’s currency. There are a number of countries already working to develop CBDCs utilizing Hyperledger’s open-source, open-governance distributed ledgers Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu and Hyperledger Iroha.

Aside from transforming currencies and bonds, asset tokenization is being applied to a range of securities and other financial assets, including physical ones. Tokenized on-chain assets in particular have the potential to unlock access to liquidity in the market while increasing freedom and access for investor capital. Traditionally illiquid assets, such as real estate or fine art, can have their value unlocked through the process of tokenization, which opens the door to tremendous possibilities for new investment. Case in point: Global law firm DLA Piper recently launched its TOKO tokenization platform to issue non-fungible tokens across asset classes including real estate, fine art, debt and even intellectual property. Toko is a digital asset creation engine to solve inefficiencies in today’s capital markets by using DLTs to distribute, trade and settle transactions rapidly, bypassing the need for trusted third party intermediaries that are both expensive and slow. It is built using the combination of a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network and the Hedera Token Service.

The technology also facilitates positive environmental impacts and ESG reporting. For example, a recently concluded trial conducted by the United Nation, Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority successfully resulted in two separate prototypes of tokenized green bonds. Built using Hyperledger Besu along with technologies from Digital Asset and Allinfra Climate, the prototypes ensure the tracking of mitigation outcome interests (MOIs), an essential aspect of environmentally focused economic efforts.

This is just a sampling of the growing impact of asset tokenization. A new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and ADDX estimates that asset tokenization will reach $16 trillion by 2030, or 10% of global GDP. To put that figure in context, in 2020 the total assets under management for ETFs were $7 trillion, and total real estate investment trusts (REITs) were worth $2.5 trillion in 2021. As we already see across our community, the breadth of use cases for DLTs and tokenized assets stretches across industries, with the potential to dramatically improve upon much of the critical infrastructure that the global economy currently relies on.

Despite industry disruptions and market fluctuations, we are continuing to build enterprise-grade DLT technology that unlocks a previously unimaginable amount of capital and value. As we move forward into the new year, the Hyperledger Foundation is committed more than ever to fostering a robust and diverse ecosystem for open-source enterprise-grade blockchain technologies that will power new financial systems and models, while serving markets around the world. It’s what we call building better together. Come join us. All are welcome.

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