The third Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF) is coming up quickly (June 8-10). While this year HGF will be virtual, we’ve gathered in the past in Basel, Switzerland, and Phoenix, Arizona, and are looking forward to meeting in person again in 2022.
One of the big goals for this year is to make Hyperledger Global Forum as successful and welcoming as past events, even in its virtual format. To help keep us our eyes on that prize, we asked speakers from past events about their involvement and experience at previous HGFs. (We’ve heard from so many HGF speaking alums that we’ve created a three part “Road the Hyperledger Global Forum” series. See Part I and Part II of this series.)
The great thing about our community is that it’s home to a mix of technologists, developers, business users and innovators from starts-ups, enterprises, solution providers, research labs and universities from around the world. And they all have a voice at Hyperledger Global Forum.
Read on to learn what brought this group of past speakers from our extensive community to HGF and what made the event stand out to them. They also share updates on their projects and use cases and on the trends and technologies on their radars now.
Tell us a little bit about why you chose to speak at HGF and what your goal was.
Gigo Joseph, Chainyard: “Chainyard is a general member of Hyperledger, and we are honored to share our experiences at HGF with other members in the past few years. A good number of blockchain solutions that are developed by Chainyard are using Hyperledger, specifically Fabric. Hyperledger Global Forum is not just about enterprise blockchain protocol discussions. It is an event to learn about new ways of doing business with blockchain, its challenges, opportunity to meet potential partners and build relationships in highly interactive meetings and workshops. We find that sharing our experiences help us to stay motivated, get recognized, increase our chances to attract top talents and most importantly help us grow.”
Peter Somogyvari, Accenture: “HGF seemed like a great opportunity to meet like-minded people interested in enterprise DLTs. It also seemed like a great venue to gather feedback from the industry regarding the Cactus project (which was a lab called Blockchain Integration Framework at the time).”
Sean O’Kelly, MEI: “Collaboration, sharing, and community.”
Stephen Curran, Cloud Compass Computing Inc.: “We’re building communities around Indy and Aries and their application for verifiable credentials, and HGF is a great place to get motivated people the information they need.”
Toshiya Cho, Hitachi, Ltd.: “To dispatch information as a governing board member to increase the recognition of Hyperledger as well as promises and challenges for enterprise blockchain.”
Tell us a little about your experience speaking and attending HGF.
Carlos Alberto Castro Iragorri, Universidad del Rosario: “We were able to get interesting feedback and attention to the project. After our participation, we received a lot of emails and contacted a lot of groups with similar interest.”
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, Circulor: “Very good – engaged audience and good Q&A afterwards. Significant follow up including new customers who were in the audience.”
Gero Dittmann, IBM: “HGF provided valuable insights into the trends in blockchains for business. Our own presentation on a lightweight IoT client for Fabric was very well attended and we received great feedback.”
Waqas Mirza, Avanza Innovation: “It was a truly remarkable experience – learning about innovations taking place in different parts of the world and meeting some very smart people in the community.”
What is the most memorable part of attending and speaking at HGF?
Alejandro Vicente Grabovetsky, AID:Tech: “Presenting and being featured for a workshop was definitely an honour and highlight.”
Bharat Gupta, Infosys Consulting: “The closing session where you get a summary view of all the sessions as well as meeting with colleagues and your clients.”
Carlos: “The opportunity to participate with projects at different stages. We were at a very early stage but managed to get feedback and learn from the experience of others.”
Gero: “I was introduced to self-sovereign identity (SSI) and Hyperledger Indy, which motivated me to study the technology more deeply and I became an advocate for decentralized identity.”
Gigo: “HGF was a different experience for me, indeed. The entire crowd with a single focus of refining the enterprise blockchain ecosystem was a memorable experience. But the memories of HGF did not stop at the end of the event; it started from there. We recently won a new client who attended our 2018 HGF talk in Switzerland. When asked how they found out, the client was able to recollect our presentation two years back and was able to map his current problem to the solutions we presented. The most memorable feeling is that people remember us even after two years!”
Venkata Siva Vijayendra Bhamidipati: “Speaking with people regarding their use cases for blockchain tech. Whether it was an aid disbursing team in the UN, an airline company in Russia, a small municipality in Canada that used Hyperledger Indy for SSI, it was really memorable and exciting to see blockchain technology being used so widely and with such focus and precision.”
How has your project/use case with Hyperledger tech progressed since you spoke at HGF?
Alejandro: “Nephos, my python library for deploying Fabric to Kubernetes, got into Hyperledger Labs, but was then archived for lack of maintainers (as I had to resign as a maintainer).”
Bharat: “We are seeing uptick in demand in 2021 after the pandemic year of 2020.”
Douglas: “Volvo project evolved into a full battery passport with CO2 tracking now involving two other car manufacturers. Also a new project with a different customer as a direct result of the talk. Our collaboration with Oracle continues.”
Venkata: “After the talk I gave at HGF 2018, my team and I built upon those constructs and invented a new Blockchain Consensus Protocol called “PPoM” – Predictive Proof of Metrics and published it as an IEEE paper in BCCA 2019 . We also had a slew of patent filings, many based on the work presented in this talk.”
Waqas: “We presented a project that was already delivered to the City of Dubai. Since HGF, Avanza has implemented and delivered more than a dozen blockchain solutions for tier 1 government entities and regulators in the GCC region.”
What new enterprise blockchain topics, technologies or trends are on your radar?
Peter: “CBDCs! And of course (as a maintainer of Cactus) I’m most interested in interoperability topics.”
Sean: “Identity on the blockchain”
Stephen: “The big focus we have is mainstreaming the use of verifiable credentials — issuers, verifiers, wallets and registries of issuers.”
Toshiya: “Information sharing among multiple industries (even with competitors) is raising interests in Japanese market and a consortium called NEXCHAIN has been founded and currently 33 companies (most of them are major) joining. The more participants and stakeholders, consensus building would be tougher to expand and quickly deliver services. And interoperability would be a key issue for the environment with multiple frameworks.”
Hyperledger Global Forum, taking place June 8-10, will provide an opportunity to learn and understand various aspects of the ecosystem, including technical roadmaps, milestones and the latest uses and applications across industries and markets for Hyperledger projects and other related technologies.
To register for the virtual event, go here.
Since as far back as 450BC, people have used paper credentials to enable trusted identity. Legend has it that King Artixerxes of the Persian Empire signed and gave Nehemiah a paper “safe transit” authorization that he used in travels across the empire. People have been using such documents ever since. In technical terms, a credential is an attestation of qualification, competence, or authority issued to an entity (e.g., an individual or organization) by a third party with a relevant or de facto authority or assumed competence to do so. Examples of credentials issued to people include a driver’s license, a passport, an academic degree, proof-of-vaccination and so on. Credentials are also issued to companies, such as business registrations, building permits, and even health inspection certifications.
Figure 1. Hyperledger Fabric Explorer shows the Fabric Network for Recording Emissions 
