Blog Archives – Hyperledger

Jul 26

How innovative supply chain solutions can increase blockchain adoption

By Kamlesh Nagware, CTO Blockchain, Snapper Future Tech Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Supply Chain

Challenges in Supply Chain

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

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Blockchain Use Cases in Supply Chain

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

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

Blockchain Success Stories in Supply Chain

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

Mumbai Transport implemented TradeLens to boost efficiency and cut costs

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

Walmart brought transparency to food supply chain

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

Chainyard and IBM reduced new vendor risk and drastically cut onboarding

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

Honeywell Aerospace built an online parts marketplace

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

DLTLabs and Walmart eliminated the root problems that caused invoice disputes

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

Mindtree reinvented its loyalty platforms and merchant onboarding

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

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

Blockchain Frameworks in Supply Chain

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

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

Current State of Blockchain Adoption in Supply Chain

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

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

What is Needed For Faster Adoption of Blockchain Technology

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

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

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

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

SnapChain Architecture

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

Cover image: pxfuel

Jul 23

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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 Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group Guest Presentation: An Introduction to Minifabric

Join the Media and Entertainment SIG for a guest presentation by IBM’s Tong Li on Minifabric, a Hyperledger Lab. Hyperledger Fabric is the clear leader in permission based blockchain frameworks. It has become the de facto standard for enterprise blockchain platforms. Its performance and data privacy capabilities are second to none in the very crowded blockchain fields. However, its powerful capabilities come with some challenges in its deployments, implementations and understanding, especially for those who are used to other blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

It does not have to be that way. With the right tooling, one can easily deploy Fabric networks, learn how Fabric works, understand the life cycles of Fabric artifacts and become an expert as a Fabric network administrator or chaincode developer. Minifabric allows users to easily setup a Fabric network, expand the network, install and upgrade their own chaincode, invoke transactions, inspect the ledger, and change configurations of their channel. This presentation will explain how to go through these tasks using Minifabric to develop valuable skills and a complete understanding of Hyperledger Fabric.

For more information on the meeting, which is Tuesday, July 27, at 9:00 AM PDT, go here.

Hyperledger In-depth: An hour with SIMBA Chain

Blockchains have been around for more than ten years, and, since 2015, a plethora of systems have been launched to target more flexible use cases. More recently, several enterprise blockchain systems, such as Consensys Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, have been launched to make blockchain simpler to apply in complex organizational configurations. In this discussion on “Connecting Supplier and DoD Blockchains for Transparent Part Tracking,” Joel Neidig and Anjon Roy of SIMBA Chain will identify a specific Department of Defense use case, extrapolate requirements, and perform a thorough assessment of the different layers of the blockchain stack to identify the existing state of the art and undertake a gap analysis of the technology for this context. They will describe a platform that meets many of these challenges and show how they architected, designed, and implemented a solution for this use case for deployment at NAVAIR connecting transactions from two separate blockchain systems, Consensys Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, and use a graph-based approach that preserves privacy while enabling full transparency across the military and supplier networks.

Tune on Wednesday, July 28, at 10:00 AM PDT. For more information and to register, go here.

Linux Foundation Training sale

Save $100 on all Linux Foundation Training training courses and certification exams through July 30 in recognition of Systems Admin Day. Just use the code SYSADMIN100 at checkout. You’ll also get a free hat!

Find more details here.

Virtual Meetups

Thursday, July 29, at 15:00 UTC / 16:00 BST: Hyperledger London hosts “Hyperledger Fabric: Next -generation Hyperledger Fabric managed services”
Thursday, July 29, at 12:30 UTC / 18:00 IST: Hyperledger India Chapter hosts “FireFly: Introduction and Get Involved series for India/Asia Pacific”

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Jul 21

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Developer showcase series: Karthik Mohan, KrypC Technologies

By Hyperledger Blog, Developer Showcase

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Karthik Mohan, Enterprise Blockchain Research Engineer at KrypC Technologies.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain

At KrypC, I work on the development of the KrypCore Blockchain as a Service Product Suite. This suit extends our KrypCore Product, which is a designer studio built over Hyperledger Fabric for network, chaincode and fabric component management. I am responsible for the managed services that are provided through two different channels in the market.

KrypCore Managed Services uses our in-house deployer tool “BaaS Central” to create managed clusters in multiple cloud environments along with other storage and key management services. KrypCore Managed Services provides on-demand network expansion by providing features to add and run setup for organisations and to add peers to existing networks. I handle the research, design and development of everything under the managed services category.

I learned a lot during the design and development of our managed services and still continue to learn as cloud native development of blockchain systems, especially Hyperledger Fabric, is still a long way from being perfect.

The second channel of managed services is provided via Azure Marketplace in the form of Infrastructure as Code. I have been part of this research and implementation activity over the last six months and have worked on different cloud environments and marketplaces in this period. Cloud marketplaces are a great way to understand which model appeals to actual consumers.

I took a liking to blockchain while I was with IBM as the concept of decentralization and a tool that enables it in such scale seemed fascinating. I read blockchain content available online and took mentorship programmes during my free time. All the effort I put in during this phase of my career has helped me become a very productive developer in this technology.

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

We work with Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Fabric SDK Go. We have done our fair share of research and development with Hyperledger Explorer, Cello and Caliper as well.

Hyperledger Fabric essentially is the bespoke enterprise blockchain protocol. We are able to build multiple use cases of varying complexities in a short amount of time, and we see a solid roadmap being laid out for its development by the community. These are all encouraging signs for anyone to start developing with Hyperledger. At the start, we advocated using Hyperledger projects for enterprise use cases. Now, as the projects have matured, we are observing the market preferring Hyperledger projects over others without any nudge in that direction from us. Overall, the experience has been great, and the community for Hyperledger is very active. It’s great to be a developer.

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

Interoperability with public blockchain protocols where a set of few keys and their read-write information can be transcribed to become available as public information would go a long way in helping present Hyperledger Fabric as the baseline blockchain framework. If this could come as a native feature, it would be very beneficial. Better monitoring and analytics capability on Fabric’s infrastructure and transactions is another important milestone for the community to focus on for the next year.

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

Understand the infrastructure needed for the blockchain systems to function in early stages of learning. Each protocol comes with its own trade-offs so understanding the underlying infrastructure helps paint a picture in your mind regarding the architecture, transaction flow and applicability of those protocols to your use case.

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

Public transit could be the gateway for blockchain to enter everyday lives of the population. This use case could mean that the commuters won’t have to deal with poor treatment when they resort to public transportation. A blockchain-based solution could deliver greater visibility of transportation availability, maintenance schedule and transit equality. A token-based payments and incentive system could further the green cause.

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

I hope to see blockchain systems in smart cities governing public transit in the next five years and then moving onto becoming an all encompassing nervous system for our future metropolises.

Hyperledger could grow much further by incubating more supplementary projects that enhance the distributed ledgers that have seen large-scale mainstream adoption. The improving support system for the DLTs will drive the enterprise blockchain economy with a clear view of return on investment in a shorter period of time.

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

Leave the code cleaner than you found it!

What technology could you not live without?

An Android Smartphone – data at your fingertips.

Jul 19

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Hyperledger Global Forum Highlights: CBDCs, programmable money and interoperability – part II

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Global Forum

As we covered in Part I of this series, CBDC and other payment projects are moving quickly from prototypes to pilots and beyond with some well known projects already in production. As CBDCs and other cross border payment use cases mature, central banks continue to partner with the private sector from small to big companies to accelerate and innovate, and the Hyperledger open source community is at the forefront of the most public CBDC projects.

At this year’s Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF), those on the front lines of CBDC deployments and the development of critical underlying platforms and technologies presented a mix of talks about requirements for and challenges of implementing current and future payment solutions.

Read on for some of the more technical highlights from HGF on the CBDC, programmable money and currency interoperability:

Build CBDC Platform on Hyperledger Besu – Dive in Retail CBDC’s Architecture – Charles d’Haussy, ConsenSys

In this session, attendees got an overview of the architecture of the CBDC platforms powered by Hyperledger Besu.

(8:16) Charles d’Haussy on selecting a CBDC platform: “We mostly recommend building platforms that have public and private capacities so it’s a perfect fit with Hyperledger Besu…we also like to build on systems which are interoperable and global…”

This engaging discussion was then followed by a deep dive from John Velissarios from Accenture into the current landscape of CBDC research and experimentation across the globe.

(26:20) James Edwards on Bakong’s impact on the Cambodian payments ecosystem: “Bakong allows users of commercial banks to take advantage of the PSP’s huge networks of over the counter agents so it has made life a lot more convenient for Cambodians and for Cambodians small businesses. It has also incentivized PSPs to develop more bank-like services, a wider range of services, and has incentivized banks to develop a wider range of PSP-like services so it is enriching competition within the Cambodian payments ecosystem…”

Other sessions of interest from Hyperledger Global Forum on the subject:

Panel: Hyperledger Contributions from IBM – Kelly Ryan, Rakesh Mohan, Chris Ferris, Arnaud Le Hors & Elli Androulaki, IBM (Sponsored by IBM)

This session explored two new Hyperledger Labs: Fabric Token SDK, which enables the creation of CBDCs, and Smart Fabric Client, which is already in use with a major European Central Bank project.

Digital Currency Interoperability With Messages – Vipin Bharathan, dlt.nyc

This discussion, led by the Hyperledger Capital Markets SIG Chair Vipin Bharathan, focused on challenges facing digital currency interoperability and took a deep look at one of the current trends in implementing interoperability: message-based interoperability.

Smart Contracts with Tokenized Fiat Currency on Sberbank’s Platform – Oleg Abdrashitov, Sberbank

This presentation was an introduction to a platform for the issuance of digital assets and smart contracts developed at Sberbank’s Blockchain Laboratory. Smart contracts settle in Sber’s stablecoin: a tokenized ruble. The platform uses Hyperledger Fabric with improvements: Smart BFT for ordering, and with localized cryptography. Transaction confidentiality is achieved via Confidential Non Fungible Tokens. Sber’s platform is scheduled to go live in 2021 for the bank’s commercial clients and will be open for developers to deploy their smart contracts and applications.

Beyond Hyperledger Global Forum

In addition to being a key topic at HGF, CBDCs and other payment innovations are regular topics for discussions and activity across the Hyperledger community. Here are some talks and events, including resources for anyone looking to take part in the CBDC Global Challenge, to check out:

An on-demand replay of the July 13 Singapore Fintech Festival Green Shoots Series | Global CBDC Challenge session: “An impact making opportunity not to be missed” moderated by Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer, MAS, with speakers for the IMF and World Bank as well as Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf
Hyperledger Capital Markets SIG talk by Saket Sinha, Global VP FSS, IBM on “CBDCs Promise and Risk : Operationalizing CBDCs”CBDCs, Promise & Risk”
A panel discussion from the May 26 virtual Synchronize series on CDBCs moderated by Hyperledger’s Karen Ottoni with speakers from ConsenSys, Digital Asset, SilverBank and more

How else can you get involved in this work happening at Hyperledger?

Join as a Hyperledger member. Our member companies are leaders in financial services and technology working on these exciting projects. Learn more about membership.
Participate in our open communities, like our Capital Markets SIG.
Deep dive into Hyperledger projects with training and certifications.
Attend other Hyperledger events and webinars.

Jul 16

Love1

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.

Hyperledger Supply Chain Special Interest Group Guest Presentation: Certifying the compliance of vehicle components from design to production at Renault

Join the Supply Chain SIG for a guest presentation by Odile Panciatic, blockchain project vice president, Renault Group, on “Certifying the compliance of vehicle components from design to production at Renault.”

For more information on the meeting, which is Thursday, July 22, at noon EDT, go here.

Input Wanted: Open Source Jobs Report surveys

The Linux Foundation is once again partnering with edX for the next iteration of its Open Source Jobs Report. The report examines the latest trends in open source careers, which skills are in demand, what motivates open source job seekers, and how employers can attract and retain top talent. This year’s report will also examine the effects of the ongoing pandemic on the industry.

The report is anchored by two surveys, one of which explores what hiring managers are looking for in employees, and one focused on what motivates open source professionals. Ten respondents to each survey (twenty in total) will be randomly selected to receive a US$150 gift card to the new Linux Foundation online store as a thank you for participating!

We encourage you to share your thoughts and experiences. The surveys take around 10 minutes to complete, and all data is collected anonymously.

To get more details or to take one of the surveys, go here.

Input Wanted: Survey on Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in Open Source

The Linux Foundation and its partners are researching areas related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within open source communities in order to better understand contributor demographics and dynamics concerning overall participation. The objective is to identify sentiments and gaps to be addressed in open source communities specifically, as a means to advancing inclusive cultures in these environments. Whether you’re a long-time maintainer, a new contributor, or if you are an open source-curious person, we want to hear from you!

The survey will take 15 minutes or less, and will be used to create an anonymized open data set that is freely available to the public to better understand the people who use and create open source technologies. It survey is open to anyone who uses, contributes to, or thinks about open source software and is available in a number of languages.

To get more details or to take the survey, go here.

Virtual Meetups

Thursday, July 22, at 15:00 UTC / 9:00 MDT: Hyperledger Denver hosts “FireFly: A multiparty system for enterprise data flows powered by blockchain”
Thursday, July 22, at 16:00 UTC / 18:00 CEST: Hyperledger Budapest hosts “Hyperledger Fabric and Monitoring”
Thursday, July 22 at 22:00 UTC / 19:00 BRT: Hyperledger Brazil Chapter hosts “Jornalismo na era do Blockchain e criptoativos” (Portuguese)

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Jul 14

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Hyperledger Global Forum Highlights: CBDCs, programmable money and interoperability – Part I

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Global Forum

Central Bank Digital Currency projects, known as CBDCs, are moving quickly from prototypes to pilots and beyond with some well known projects already in production. As CBDCs and other cross border payment use cases mature, central banks continue to partner with the private sector from small to big companies to accelerate and innovate, and the Hyperledger open source community is at the forefront of the most public CBDC projects.

As seen at this year’s 2021 Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF), the annual global event where the Hyperledger community gathers to showcase their work with Hyperledger technologies, there is a wide range of activities underway tied to CBDCs and cross border payment. Talks covered key technologies, lessons learned and industry trends as well as production implementations like the work Hyperledger member Soramisto has done with National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) to the leading work Accenture has been doing for years in the digital currency space.

In addition to developing products and services to deliver to their central bank customers, the Hyperledger community is also working to build the future of digital money with open source principles and goals. Efforts range from market leading discussions in our Capital Markets and Trade Finance Special Interest Groups to IBM’s recent contribution of code bases already in use in conjunction with a major European Central Bank Project. These are now Smart Fabric Client and Fabric Token SDK, two new Hyperledger Labs

Technology innovation happens when companies, academics and regulators come together to meet common goals, and Hyperledger is proud to host the development of code that will enable payment innovations around the world. Read on for highlights from HGF and to learn more about how you can get involved.

On Stage at Hyperledger Global Forum

Keynote Panel: Asia Pacific CBDC Innovation, Collaboration and the Drive to Interoperability – HE Serey Chea, National Bank of Cambodia (NBC); Sopnendu Mohanty, Monetary Authority of Singapore; Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger

During this session, National Bank of Cambodia’s Assistant Governor HE Serey Chea shared with the audience the work NBC has already put into production with a retail CBDC, working with Hyperledger member Soramisto using Hyperledger Iroha. A deep dive into this project is also available as a full Hyperledger case study.

Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), shared some of the outcomes of their leading Project Ubin work and announced a new Global CBDC challenge that the Hyperledger community is supporting as a technical partner. Read more about the CBDC Challenge here.

While the National Bank Cambodia selected Hyperledger Iroha for its retail CBDC implementation, multiple implementations are using other Hyperledger projects, primarily Hyperledger Besu and Hyperledger Fabric. As highlighted below, choice in DLT protocols is important to support and nurture and with that the need for interoperability becomes more important, and during HGF many sessions addressed the needs of our community to come together and resolve.

Fireside Chat on Central Bank Digital Currencies – Dave Treat & John Velissarios, Accenture; Jennifer Peve, DTCC

In this session, both Accenture and DTCC highlighted how CBDC is fast approaching and here to stay. Dave Treat, Senior Managing Director, Global Blockchain Lead, Accenture, and Jennifer Peve, Managing Director, Business Innovation, DTCC, covered the benefits and different approaches to developing a third form of central bank money for our digital world. They offered some practical examples of using Hyperledger Cactus and the Blockchain Automation Framework and a call for our community not to lose faith.

(23:30) DTTC’s Jennifer Peve on the positive momentum in the digital currency space: “Things are happening across Accenture, across DTCC, there many other financial institutions in this space progressing the conversation using distributed ledger and tokenized assets and even looking at the concept of digital currencies, it should be viewed as incredibly positive to see these iterations continue… these are not easy things to solve overnight..don’t lose faith, some of these things are just not easy things to solve.”

This engaging discussion was then followed by a deep dive from John Velissarios from Accenture into the current landscape of CBDC research and experimentation across the globe.

(52:28) John Velissarios’s call to action to get involved: “There’s a strong willingness to share to explore open source ideas, to openly develop new concepts and new ideas…get ready for innovation that will be coming out way imminently.”

(30:30) John Velissarios from Accenture on the innovation behind CBDC: “the ability to bundle both the value and the ownership in a single item that you can transfer from one entity to the next.” Why now: “The technology has become much more mature…there’s a lot more appetite in the marketplace.”

Hyperledger Besu Use Cases – Grace Hartley, ConsenSys; Adam Clarke, Fnality International

For those interested in Hyperledger Besu, this session provided an overview of how the platform is used by Fnality. Fnality International is a financial technology firm founded in 2019 by a consortium of international banks and an exchange to create a network of distributed financial market infrastructures using blockchain to deliver the means of payment-on-chain for wholesale banking markets.

(7:33) Adam Clarke, CTO, Fnality International, on working with the Bank of England: “We’ve put in our application for our first central bank account…When participants of our network fund the Fnality bank account, we will effectively tokenize that money and give full ownership of that money back to them immediately and that effectively removes the counterparty risk. They don’t have to move money through a counterparty, but also they they can also use the DLT to move money between participants instantly with legal settlement finality without having to worry about two or three day settlement period.”

(10:22) Adam Clarke on finding the right DLT platform: “It has to be closed. It has to be permissioned. We are never going to run this on mainnet for obvious reasons, we’re backing central bank money…and actually the consensus algorithm within Besu being IBFT2 or IBFT kind of algorithm allows us to actually get to the point we can show that we have legal settlement finality at a given point within the consensus algorithm so really important for central banks and for meeting regulation.”

Look for part II of this series, which will include highlights from technical talks centered around CBDC and digital currencies.

How else can you get involved in this work happening at Hyperledger?

Join as a Hyperledger member. Our member companies are leaders in financial services and technology working on these exciting projects. Learn more about membership.
Participate in our open communities, like our Capital Markets SIG.
Deep dive into Hyperledger projects with training and certifications.
Attend other Hyperledger events and webinars.

Jul 09

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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.

Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group Guest Presentation: Real Product Carbon Footprint to Achieve Decarbonization

Join the Climate Action and Accounting SIG for a guest presentation by Gunther Walden, CEO of CircularTree, on measuring real carbon footprints. Many companies have set targets for themselves for when they want to be carbon neutral. However, this does not mean that their products are carbon neutral. A study by the Carbon Disclosure Project has revealed that, on average, 80% of the product carbon footprint comes through the supply chain. CircularTree helps companies to measure their real carbon footprint leveraging blockchain technology to remove ambiguity between trade partners. Companies can get accurate, granular, and verified primary emissions data of their purchased materials and products. This transparency enables companies to provide real product carbon footprint information to their customers. Gunther will explain how their solution is designed, provide some insights in their award-winning pilot project with Porsche, BASF and Motherson and lay out a strategy to achieve mass adoption of this approach.

For more information on the meeting, which is Tuesday, July 13, at 8:00 AM PDT, go here.

Hyperledger Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group Guest Presentation: Introducing Palm NFT Studio

Join the Media and Entertainment SIG for a guest presentation by Matt Mason, Chief Content Officer at Palm, to learn about how Palm NFT Studio collaborates with creatives, artists, marketplaces, and rights holders to bring projects and platforms into the Palm ecosystem. The Palm ecosystem will ultimately be driven by a native token, $PALM, and is expected to be up to 99% more energy efficient than Proof of Work-based blockchain networks, providing artists a more sustainable solution today while Ethereum upgrades to Proof of Stake. Creators using the Palm ecosystem will benefit from super low gas fees, and the Palm ecosystem will reward both creators and participants.

For more information on the meeting, which is Tuesday, July 13, at 7:00 PM PDT, go here.

MOBI Community Innovation Lecture Series: Monetization in Blockchain Business Networks

The next talk in MOBI’s (Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative) Community Innovation Lecture Series will focus on new monetization opportunities for data and services in business networks. This panel will explore opportunities to monetize data and services within consortium networks. The expert panelist will share their differing perspectives from across industries on the role of data, shared services, governance and tokens. Expect to leave the event with a clearer picture of the possible ledger-based business models for mobility, permissioned data and the “trusted trip,” as well as how core network services of governance, authority, identity, and assurance (GAIA) can accelerate monetization.

To learn more or to register for the lecture, which is Wednesday, July 14, at 7:00 AM PDT, go here.

Hyperledger In-depth: An Hour with Public Mint

Despite their many benefits, cryptocurrencies still suffer from shortcomings that cause businesses and individuals to struggle in the space. Crypto-native companies find it hard to work outside of the blockchain, and traditional businesses are wary of the uncertainty in operating with native crypto assets. Stablecoins have taken the first step towards wider adoption, but in their current form still suffer from many shortcomings – they only really solve a part of the problem. On their own, most stablecoins do not fully bridge the gap between crypto and fiat. Even if they do add some stability to the ecosystem, they are simply not designed to address business processes outside the cryptosphere. In this session, Co-founder and CTO Jorge Pereira of Public Mint will explain how the company has used Hyperledger Besu to build a veritable fiat blockchain and a seamless bridge between the realms – giving fiat money crypto superpowers to tap into the $94+ trillion traditional economy.

Tune on Wednesday, July 14, at 10:00 AM PDT. For more information and to register, go here.

IBM Blockscape: A Virtual Escape Room Experience

Come have a bit of fun testing your general knowledge and problem solving with other blockchain enthusiasts, complements of IBM, in a “virtual escape room” experience.

For more information or to register for this July 15 networking event, go here.

Input Wanted: Survey on DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities

A mentorship project to support the Hyperledger Learning Materials and Development Working Group is underway to develop a Global Directory of DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities. Learning about blockchain and DLT is difficult. Overwhelming amounts of unorganized information lies scattered across the web. The project aims to gather a community of learners where newcomers will have a helpful tool to learn quickly.

To help this project, please answer this questionnaire, which is available in 11 languages: English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and Russian, about your experience with blockchain learning resources.

Virtual Meetups

Saturday, July 10, at 9:00 UTC / 19:00 AEST: Hyperledger Sydney hosts “KNOW YOUR FOOD – Making Supply Chains Safe, Sustainable, and Transparent”
Wednesday, July 14, at 15:00 UTC / 17:00 CEST: Hyperledger Frankfurt hosts virtual meetup

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Jul 07

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The latest on Minifabric: a Hyperledger Lab aimed at accelerating the move to production

By Tong Li, IBM Open Technology Blog, Hyperledger Labs

Minifabric is a Hyperledger Lab that makes setting up a Hyperledger Fabric network easy and fast. It also helps application developers with needed connection profiles and wallets when a Fabric network is up and running. Hyperledger Fabric has powerful capabilities, but there can be challenges with using it to deploy and implement a network, especially for those who are new to distributed ledgers or are used to other blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

With the right tooling though, you can easily deploy Fabric networks, learn how Fabric works, understand the life cycles of Fabric artifacts and become an expert as a Fabric network administrator or chaincode developer. The Minifabric Lab was started with these goals in mind. allows you to easily setup a Fabric network, expand your network, install and upgrade your own chaincode, invoke transactions, inspect your ledger, and change configurations of your channel.

Minifabric comes as a 10-line bash script (for Linux and OS X) or 30-line batch script (for Windows) and is available on github.com under Apache 2 license. You can get started with Minifabric to start your Hyperledger Fabric journey by simply following this README.

Recent development work has also added the capability to deploy Hyperledger Fabric onto Kubernetes. In the past, one could use Minifabric to deploy and use Fabric in a Docker environment. Now, with this new added feature, you can deploy Fabric onto Kubernetes clusters such as IKS, GKE and AKS. The commands to accomplish this task are identical with the commands to deploy in a Docker environment, which makes a big difference in terms of using and learning Minifabric.

Minifabric Resources

On Tuesday, July 27 at 9AM PDT, I will be giving an hour long introduction and demo of Minifabric and will be answering questions. This will be an open call, and everyone is welcome to dial-in and join.

There are also already recorded videos that can help you learn to use Minifabric. Here’s a rundown of video resources and what they cover:

Minifabric Introduction and demo
An overview of Minifabric and demonstration of how to develop go applications using these profiles and monitor the Fabric network using Hyperledger Explorer.

Quick Start
How to use Minifabric to stand up a Fabric network and clean up

Channels
How to create channels, join peers to channels, inspect and change channel configuration

Chaincode
How to work with chaincode including install, approve, commit, upgrade, invoke and query

Policy and Organizations
How to inspect and change endorsement policies, how to bring in new organizations and how to work with private data collections

Artifacts and VSCode Fabric Extension
How to use VSCode Fabric extension to work with a production like Fabric network. Minifabric creates many files that help Fabric SDK users easily connect to a Fabric network.

Inside Minifabric
How Minifabric executes various commands and how Minifabric is able to always keep up with the latest Fabric. Discusses how Minifabric was designed and implemented, its commands and parameters.

Get Involved

As an open source project, you are welcome to check out the code, submit your own contributions and connect with other people in the community. Check out the Minifabric repo on Github to learn more about how to get involved.

Jul 02

Love1

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.

Webinar: How Blockchain Can Build A More Resilient, Effective Future For the Humanitarian Sector

The humanitarian sector has typically relied upon often outdated, proprietary technology solutions for managing and releasing aid, creating a risk of data loss, errors and duplication of efforts across organisations. The last year was overwhelmed by the Covid-19, and the coronavirus pandemic threatens aid budgets. Panelists from Emerge, Kiva and AID:Tech will discuss how distributed ledger technologies could be the solution to deliver significant savings for aid organisations and donors while offering potential to improve monitoring and evaluation processes. The webinar will make the case for investing in DLT to unlock innovation in the humanitarian and development aid sectors. With the increasing threats such as pandemics, climate change and natural disasters, we are here to advocate for a more distributed, efficient, and resilient future.

Tune on Thursday, July 8, at 7:30 AM PDT. For more information and to register, go here.

Free Hyperledger Besu Essentials course

Learn how to install Hyperledger Besu, start up Hyperledger Besu for Ethereum mainnet and build a Hyperledger Besu private network in the free Hyperledger Besu Essentials: Creating a Private Blockchain Network course from Linux Foundation Training.

Virtual Meetups

Thursday, July 8, at 22:30 UTC / 16:30 MDT: Hyperledger Denver hosts “Blockchain Employment Series: What Jobs are Available Worldwide?”
Saturday, July 10, at 9:00 UTC / 19:00 AEST: Hyperledger Sydney hosts “KNOW YOUR FOOD – Making Supply Chains Safe, Sustainable, and Transparent”

See the full Virtual Meetup schedule here.

Jun 30

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Avoid Ransomware Using BIoT – A Lightweight Zero Trust Architecture using Hyperledger Fabric

By Owen Wang, BDATA, and Nima Afraz, School of Computer Science at University College Dublin Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Let’s talk about cyberattacks

Before the pandemic hit, the world was already experiencing an increase in cybercriminal activities. The pandemic is merely a catalyst that made the cybersecurity problem even worse. From the start of the pandemic to the economic shutdown, companies worldwide have been forced to let their employees work from home at short notice. Many companies are not prepared for their employees to access intranets from their homes with various levels of security. For example, some employees do not have updated computers and many have computers already infected with viruses, malware, and trojan software. Such unsecured connections and the blurred usage between work and personal computers have increased IT/OT infrastructure vulnerabilities and expose companies to cyberattacks.

In the past six months, there have already been several major attacks on infrastructures and critical industries:

The Irish Health Service Executive cyberattack: On May 14, 2021, the HSE reported a major ransomware cyberattack that caused all of its IT systems nationwide to be shut down to prevent further damage. The HSE ransomware attack that has crippled the Irish healthcare system since mid-May started when a single computer stopped working, and the HSE worker reached out for help by clicking on a disguised link that led to a drive-by download of ransomware.

Colonial pipeline ransomware: On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline suffered ransomware attacks that resulted in the company paying five million dollars to the hackers to unlock the system. While the company did not release any information on how the ransomware infected the company’s computers, some insiders familiar with the matter said the VMware was compromised through an open port.

Oldsmar, Florida, water treatment plan hack: On February 8, 2021, the Oldsmar water treatment plant was hacked. The hacker was able to gain access to a control computer and attempted to increase the sodium hydroxide level in the drinking water. Luckily, the attempt was stopped in time by the operator.

Advantech’s ransomware attack: On November 20, 2020, the global industrial computer manufacturing company Advantech was hit by a ransomware attack, and the people behind the attack demanded a ransom of 750 Bitcoins ($13.8 million).

Unsecured connectivities, infested home devices, and password-driven technologies could be the reason why cyberattacks, cyberwarfare, and ransomware are hitting daily news headlines at an unprecedented rate. Meanwhile, hackers leverage the scale of impact as their bargaining chip to force governments or corporations into compliance.

The ransomware business model

The business model of ransomware is simple: the attackers infect the victim’s computer with ransomware through a phishing email, drive-by download of trojan software or through stolen password, infest the key computers in the network, open a port for attack and data transmission, then lock the important data away, generate a cryptographic key and hide it until the victim pays up the ransom.

Attackers can choose to go after smaller victims for smaller ransom amounts or risk attacking larger victims, or go big game hunting. Although the prize for big game hunting is considerably more tempting, the risks are higher. For instance, attacking a bigger target (e.g., a government organization, healthcare system, or energy infrastructure) puts the attackers on the radar of law enforcement. These larger targets are also less likely to pay the ransom to avoid funding future attacks by these cybercriminal gangs.

Targeting smaller but numerous victims requires more workforce as the attackers have to penetrate the victims’ networks and negotiate and convince every one of them to pay the ransom. In addition to being costly, more humans involved means more space for error and eventually jeopardizing the entire operation. However, smaller targets are more likely to choose the easy way out and pay the ransom to avoid scandal, panicking customers, and plummeting stock prices. Perhaps all of these pros and cons have made the cybercriminal gangs go back and forth with small and big targets and try their luck.

The current cybersecurity solution

The most common approach companies take to secure their network is through layering and isolation. In the simplest term, layering architecture helps companies to ‘limit’ access from different levels of users. For example, a public user can only visit the public section of a website while the employees with special privileges can access the backend of the site. This approach is simple and easy to create. However, the biggest challenge is that if the authentication of a superuser is compromised or malware secretly opens a port to the attacker, the layering system will not be able to stop the attacker because systems using layering architecture always trust local connections and requests. In the view of the attackers, once they pass the gate, it is a free buffet. It is especially true that conventional tunneling technologies such as Virtual Private Network, VPN, could help mitigate some cybersecurity threats by strengthening the external connection. However, VPN is still a password-driven technology, and as long as there is a single weak point in the VPN network, the entire network’s safety is jeopardized.

Blockchain and Zero-Trust netwworks

Blockchain technology offers several advantages when used for data encryption and communication. In a blockchain, data is structured into blocks, and each block contains a ledger to keep a bundle of transactions in a decentralized structure. What makes blockchain secure is that all transactions must be approved and validated by all the nodes in the chain through a consensus mechanism. Blockchain technology’s immutable and decentralized nature makes the data impossible to tamper with and the network nearly impossible to hack.

Blockchain can greatly enhance the zero-trust network. In a zero-trust network, any transaction needs to be authenticated. The network controller does not ‘trust’ any request or command sender until that sender can be verified for each action. Blockchain can enhance the network by:

a.    Detection of suspicious activity in any transaction
b.    Isolation of connection
c.    Access limits for certain users until cybersecurity officers have a closer look
d.    Immutable policies due to the immutable nature of blockchain

Despite blockchain technology’s advantages in cybersecurity, the application of blockchain technology is limited largely to supply chain, fintech, and digital currency at the moment.

Several roadblocks are hindering the implementation of the blockchain in network security. First, the latency caused by updating all nodes can pose operational problems. Second, the size of the ledgers may be an issue for IoT devices and smaller devices to use blockchain. Third, it drives up the energy consumption for the network.

BDATA and BIoT technology

BDATA (www.Bdata.ca), a Toronto-based company, has taken a stab at the roadblocks for using blockchain in cybersecurity. BDATA has developed BIoT (Blockchain Internet of Things) technology, which is a lightweight and low latency blockchain.

BIoT uses the multichain architecture based on Hyperledger Fabric, which creates complex on-device security. BIoT technology is also energy friendly since it requires low processing power and low RAM to run on edge devices. BIoT technology has also avoided the problem with high latency and large file issues associated with blockchain technology. BIoT is a lightweight (<50MB) and low latency (<10ms on 5G and <40 ms on 4G LTE) protocol that can be deployed on any device.

BIoT technology is also cost effective when compared with the practice most companies are doing. The majority of the companies are using MQTT for data streaming, VPN for handshake connectivity, intrusion detection systems (IDS) for device monitoring, and device management (DM) for endpoint management, and each application costs significant resources to deploy and maintain. BIoT is an all-in-one solution as the technology contains functionalities such as authentication, intrusion detection, data streaming, endpoint management, and KPIs ensuring IT/OT infrastructure security.

The following are the steps to deploy BIoT technology:

Register organization and deploy BIoT endorsing peers
Extract devices board identity (e.g, for Mac, Hardware UUID)
Register device using board identity
Deploy BIoT peer on the device using the curl command:
o    BIoT peer will read the device board ID to enroll the device with the BIoT chain
o    BIoT peer will stream the data fully encrypted using a cryptographic chain of TLS 1.3 certificates.
o    BIoT peer will provide complete device log analytics, intrusion detection, endpoint management, MITRE, device compliance with cybersecurity standards and many other useful features.

Upon successful consensus among the organization endorsing peers, the device will be authenticated and received a trusted status to stream data from the device to pre-authenticated designated servers on the organization’s BIoT zero-trust network. Time-stamped hashes are created for every data point streamed from the trusted device. Every hash is stored in the query-able ledger to ensure the immutability of the data, and the streamed data gets decrypted for analytics and other uses.

BIoT technology works on ARM, Intel, and AMD architectures and all the major operating systems such as Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux-based operating systems. Devices with the BIoT technology can be implemented rapidly for a consortium of organizations or an individual organization without duplicating data. Early adopters of the technology include Advantech, Supermicro, Intel, Arrow, and ASUS IoT edge devices.

BIoT features include:

Multichain Architecture – BIoT has four chains:
i.    Device Authentication
ii.    Data Streaming
iii.    Endpoint Management
iv.    Intrusion Detection System
Cryptographic chain of TLS certificates
DevOps & serverless technologies to auto manage the data load and peer deployments

Differences between BIoT and VPN

BIoT technology has several advantages when compared with VPN technology:

1. First, the machine-to-machine trust is automatically established in the BIoT network. This helps the machine to communicate with other machines on the trusted network of machines without password-driven authentication. The network trust is handled entirely by the blockchain, based on the device’s unique board identity.

2. Second, any data transaction is traceable and is always ready for auditing. The blockchain ledgers store the hashes of each data transaction, which ensures data immutability, and the hashes are always ready for the read operation. Currently, companies do backups to store the data, but data trust is always a big question during the backup. BIoT’s data immutability ensures data backup without compromising data quality and authenticity.

3. BIoT runs on a zero-trust network. Every operation is recorded on the ledger, and all the nodes in the chain authenticate every block. If any anomaly happens, the BIoT intrusion detection mechanism will be triggered, and the operators will be alerted in real-time.

A brighter future of remote working and IoT using BIoT

As manufacturing automation and edge device implementation are growing exponentially, the need to protect remote assets and keep the network safe from cyberattacks is also increasing exponentially. Data privacy and integrity are also paramount in many verticals of our society, such as medical, defense, and smart city infrastructure. Likewise, with a continued increased number of remote access and IoT deployments, cyber criminal activities will be on the rise. BIoT can be a great resource for companies to add an immutable layer of security to fight against advanced and diverse cyberattacks.

About the contributors

Owen Wang is the co-founder of BDATA solution. He is a professional engineer by trade and graduated from Queen’s University with an Electrical and Computer Engineering bachelor’s degree. Owen joined SIEMENS Canada after university and led a team of R&D software developers before finishing his MBA degree from Schulich School of Business. Now, Owen and Syed Bari are working together on the BDATA startup venture and working together to change the world of cybersecurity with blockchain technology.

Nima Afraz is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. He is affiliated with the CONNECT Research Centre, and his research focuses on blockchain applications in telecoms, the economics of networks, and network virtualisation. Nima is a recipient of the government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin to address the challenges in the adoption of blockchain technology in telecommunications. Nima is the vice-chair of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger telecom special interest group. He received his PhD in computer science from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, in 2020.