Want to jump start a career in blockchain development? Ready to build hands-on skills developing leading-edge open source technologies? Looking to work directly with mentors who are invested in you and your work? Then the Hyperledger Mentorship Program is for you.
Now in its sixth year, the Hyperledger Mentorship Program provides a structured and guided learning opportunity for anyone, at any career stage, looking to get started in the open source movement. With full and part time options, fully remote work and a stipend, the projects are designed to be a pathway to becoming a contributor to the Hyperledger community that work for students, people in career transition and anyone else who wants to develop or sharpen their knowledge of cutting-edge blockchain technologies. Applications are now open.
This year, the Hyperledger Mentorship Program has grown to 30 planned part and full-time projects covering a range of technologies, challenges and technical difficulty levels and includes non-development projects such as Ecosystem Analysis and Developer Marketing. Each project is designed and proposed by active members of the Hyperledger community. Those who propose the projects serve as the mentors and work closely with their mentees on developing a project plan, setting milestones and solving problems. Mentees can expect regular evaluations and feedback. For more about the program, including the schedule and stipend details, go here.
Over the last five years, more than 70 mentees have completed Hyperledger Mentorship projects. Each of these mentees have made concrete contributions to Hyperledger projects and built important connections in the community. Some, like Bertrand Rioux, have gone on to become mentors themselves:
“I was accepted into the Hyperledger mentorship program last year after seeking a community to help advance my professional goals of developing software for climate action. I was fortunate to find a diverse group of mentors that helped me build the knowledge and skills I needed to effectively contribute to the Hyperledger open source community and to have the opportunity to develop technical expertise in a field I was actively working in. In addition to delivering a secure identity management solution for a Hyperledger Fabric Network, I started contributing my own ideas to the open source operating system for climate action. As a result, I am now taking a leadership role in the community. In addition to serving as mentor in this year’s program, I proposed a project on reducing waste emission in the oil & gas industry that was accepted.” – Bertrand Rioux, Independent Energy Consultant and Mentor for the Multiple Data Integration to Hyperledger Fabric Climate Accounting Network project
To learn more about the Hyperledger Mentorship experience and outcomes, check out these spotlights on last year’s projects with highlights from both the mentors and mentees.
Read on for descriptions of some of the projects planned for this year:
Multiple Data Integration to Hyperledger Fabric Climate Accounting Network
The Hyperledger Labs blockchain-carbon-accounting project includes a Hyperledger Fabric network for recording the carbon and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions that cause climate change. Since there are many activities that cause such emissions, the network is designed to accept data from multiple sources of measurements. In this project, we will demonstrate integrations from measurement sources with blockchain networks by integrating the ThoughtWorks cloud computing emissions calculator, the NREL OpenPath mobile application, and other web- and mobile-based API’s sources to turn instrumented readings into emissions measurements. It will leverage previous projects involving Hyperledger Cactus, Vault security engines, and client security for Hyperledger Fabric.
The expected outcomes of this project are
- Successful integration of the mobile apps and API’s with Hyperledger Fabric
- Benchmark comparison of Hyperledger Fabric and alternatives
- Documentation and tutorials for integrating future data sources
Demonstrate Interoperability using Hyperledger Bevel and Cactus
Hyperledger Cactus support ledger Interoperability but use a local deployment for testing; Hyperledger Bevel supports production-worthy deployments. This project aims to support Cactus deployment using Bevel to demonstrate production-like usage of Hyperledger Cactus.
The steps will be following:
- Deploy a Hyperledger Fabric network using Bevel on a Managed Kubernetes cluster
- Deploy a GoQuorum network using Bevel on a Managed Kubernetes cluster (can be the same cluster for simplicity).
- Make changes in Hyperledger Bevel code to deploy the Cactus connectors in both the above networks.
- Run Cactus test cases.
The expected outcomes of this project are
- Successful Interoperability testing using Cactus on production like DLT networks.
- Update to Hyperledger Bevel code to automatically deploy the Cactus plugins.
- Update to Documentation of Bevel and Cactus.
- Detailed tutorials and learning materials which would benefit Bevel and Cactus communities.
Hyperledger Fabric-Ethereum token bridging
One of the key use cases of blockchain integration is asset bridging: in essence, “locking” an asset (typically, a native coin or token) in a smart contract on its authoritative ledger and making available corresponding, newly minted (wrapped/shadow/…) assets on another. By now, bridging is supported by quite mature solutions in the cryptoworld; however, the same is not true for “consortial” distributed ledger technologies. At the same time, such functionality can be expected to become an important requirement in the not too distant future: for instance, a central bank may choose to create a high performance, Hyperledger Fabric-based Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) ledger with a strongly controlled set of “smart contracts,” but allow controlled “bridging out” of the currency to dedicated distributed ledgers of industrial/enterprise cooperations.
Last year, a CBDC prototype with such functionality was created at the Dept. of Measurement and Information Systems of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), in a research project supported by the central bank of Hungary (MNB); our initial experience with a custom Hyperledger Cactus and TokenBridge based solution showed that this is a problem worth more targeted experimentation and systematic R&D.
The expected outcomes of this project are
- Report on asset representation in Hyperledger Fabric and mapping approaches to standard Ethereum tokens
- Report on bridging approaches and technologies and their applicability for bridging from/to Fabric
- Requirement specification
- Design specification
- Prototype implementation and small demo of bridging at least ERC-20 or ERC-721 to Ethereum – and back
Client Connector for Hyperledger Besu
Develop a connector that provides both synchronous and asynchronous modes of interacting with a running Hyperledger Besu node. The connector would act as an interface between an enterprise application and the Hyperledger Besu node for data ingestions and it could provide event subscription options.
The scope of the project would also include an end-to-end test on a sample network.
The expected outcomes of this project are
- Design and implement the connector.
- A new Hyperledger Labs project is proposed with a documentation.
GVCR: Secure Verifiable Credential Registries (VCR) for GitHub & GitLab
As conceptualized and standardized by the W3C, the Verifiable Credentials protocol is one of the three pillars of Self-Sovereign Identity, together with the Decentralized Identifiers protocol (DIDs) and Distributed Ledger Technology (or Blockchain). The project aims to design and build a verifiable credential registry (VCR) on GitHub repository, namely GitHub-based Verifiable Credential Registry (GVCR), by leveraging existing GitHub APIs, and other open-source tools provided by other Hyperledger projects, such as Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Indy, and Hyperledger Ursa. The basic architecture is already built. For more details about the conceptional design and workflows, please refer to the GitHub repository GitHub-VCR.
The expected outcomes of this project are
- A verifiable credential registry based on one or more GitHub repositories.
- Command-Line utility to automate the process of verification of a credential.
- Proper test cases and documentation.
- Codebase maintained with proper read me document.
The Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program is part of the Linux Foundation’s overall commitment to mentoring. The application process is being managed through LFX Mentorship, a platform created by the Linux Foundations to train future open source leaders.
Check out the full list of mentorship projects and start your application today. The deadline to apply is May 10. Mentees from diverse communities are encouraged to apply. All are welcome 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.
