Hyperledger Burrow Archives – Page 2 of 3

Jul 25

3 Things Ethereum Users Should Know about Hyperledger Burrow

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Burrow

Guest post: Casey Kuhlman, CEO, Monax

An Introduction to Hyperledger Burrow for Ether-heads

Over the years, there has been a lot of confusion within the Ethereum community about the various codebases which claim to be “Ethereum.” To us at Monax, the word Ethereum has meant a variety of things. It has meant a singular blockchain network and its attendant testnets. It has meant a series of software codebases. And it has also meant an “idea” about how smart contracting platforms operate; namely, that there should be a strongly-deterministic, smart contract native virtual machine that operates blockchain-based smart contracts.

Enter Hyperledger Burrow, one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Burrow provides a modular blockchain client with a permissioned smart contract interpreter partially developed to the specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). While it is certainly true that Hyperledger Burrow as a piece of software was not designed to be an active participant in the public Ethereum network and its testnets, in the other senses of “Ethereum”, Hyperledger Burrow has always been a member of the community.

This blog post is written to provide an overview of Hyperledger Burrow. It walks through three important things to note about the project and how those familiar with Ethereum could seek to implement proofs of concept, private or consortia blockchains.

1. Hyperledger Burrow is more like the Redis of Smart Contract Blockchains

Hyperledger Burrow maintainer, Silas Davis, often describes Burrow as the Redis of blockchains because Burrow was built to be a lightweight, efficient, and fast permissioned smart contract machine. By leveraging the hardened and speedy Tendermint protocol for consensus alongside Burrow’s Apache licensed Ethereum Virtual Machine, users have access to one of the fastest codebases available.

Speed in blockchains comes in a number of dimensions. The first dimension is the amount of transactional throughput of the codebase. We have observed in preliminary testing that Hyperledger Burrow can steadily process upwards of 200 transactions per second. This speed dimension for smart contract focused blockchains is largely a misnomer, however, because the speed of processing is strongly linked to the complexity of smart contracts operating on any one blockchains. The second dimension is the speed at which blocks are propagated within the network. Hyperledger Burrow’s blocktime is tunable, but by default produces blocks every two seconds.

The final dimension is less quantifiable but asks the question “when can my other systems rely upon the information within a given block as being final?’ Finality of blocks is a crucial issue — particularly when other business systems rely on information propagated by a blockchain network. Hyperledger Burrow was the first Ethereum style blockchain to offer its users strong finality. Relying upon the Tendermint protocol, Burrow produces a non-forking blockchain. This means that the instant that a block is added to the end of a chain that other business systems will be able to rely upon that information. Finality greatly increases the overall system speed by ensuring that upstream systems can rely on the information within a blockchain instantly.

Not only is Hyperledger Burrow, speedy, but it is also extremely lightweight. We routinely run Burrow nodes on very small cloud instances and even on Raspberry Pi’s. Burrow’s proof of stake consensus protocol is fully byzantine fault tolerant without relying on specialized hardware.

2. Hyperledger Burrow permissions without a VPN

Many users when they are first exploring blockchain technology are taking blockchain clients built for a public chain and deploying them behind a VPN. With Hyperledger Burrow, it is not necessary to operate a permissioned chain behind a VPN in order to gain fast and secure validation. Burrow’s in built capabilities based permissioning system offers users easy access to a structured permissioning system.

This means that operators of any network can establish which keys can do what things within the context of the blockchain network. Of course over time these permissions can be changed by sending a transaction signed by a key with permission to change other’s permissions within the network.

In effect, this allows users to start small and grow their ecosystems and networks over time. Many users begin their blockchain exploration with only a single company operating a blockchain network and over time seek to expand the set of operators of that network. Hyperledger Burrow’s capabilities based permissioning system is built for this ever-evolving world. Burrow is even capable of growing into a permissioned, public chain should users so desire.

3. Ethereum Virtual Machine all the Things with Hyperledger Burrow

Burrow has kick started a wave of use of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) within the context of other Hyperledger blockchain designs. From the perspective of the Burrow team, this is an amazing use of open source modalities. By working with the Hyperledger Sawtooth team, we have identified areas of how to reimplement our EVM such that it can be more easily consumed by other codebases. The effects of the collaboration between Sawtooth and Burrow teams have been the SETH system which allows Sawtooth users to operate EVM contracts within a transaction processor.

The Hyperledger Burrow team has also began working with the Hyperledger Fabric team, and the effect of that collaboration will hopefully be the ability for Fabric users to also deploy EVM contracts onto their networks to be operated by an EVM chaincode container. Such a deployment style will be a boon for Hyperledger Fabric users as it would greatly reduce any distribution challenges for smart contracts within the network. We are also collaborating actively with the Fabric team on a Web3 RPC framework that can be implemented easily and simply by multiple codebases.

These collaboration across Hyperledger teams are one of the greatest benefits for us on the Burrow team being a part of the larger Hyperledger community. Not only do we receive great feedback from upstream teams that are using our EVM in their codebases, but we also receive contributions from there projects as well.

Getting started

For those seeking to get started with the exciting possibilities that Ethereum Virtual Machine capable blockchains offer, Hyperledger Burrow is a great choice for getting started. As noted above, it is a speedy and lightweight blockchain design.

Burrow’s high-level architecture is described (in diagrammatic form) below:

Given the increased uptake in EVM usage across the Hyperledger blockchain frameworks, should the capabilities of Burrow not be suitable for production level deployments, there is an easy migration path to another of the more feature-filled blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth. Since contracts written for an EVM run the same no matter the blockchain they are running on, users can easily start with Hyperledger Burrow and over time migrate their smart contract suites to the more feature-filled platforms.

You can get started with Hyperledger Burrow today very simply. Read the documentation and/or download the code to kick the tires. You can also join the discussion on Rocket.Chat!

Jul 24

Love6

Hyperledger Sawtooth, Seth and Truffle 101

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Guest post: Nathan Aw

I develop on both Hyperledger Fabric/Sawtooth and Ethereum (to be specified, Quorum) so I am familiar with the languages available on both platform — chaincode (Go) and smart contract (Solidity). Often I am asked this question: “Which platform is better?” To which I will answer, this question is a false choice as with Hyperledger Sawtooth Seth, you can build your smart contracts in Solidity and deploy the same smart contract in Hyperledger Sawtooth — Pretty cool isn’t it? 😉

Before we get to the technical section, we need to get a handle on the basic terminology first.

What is Hyperledger Sawtooth?

Hyperledger Sawtooth is an enterprise blockchain platform for building distributed ledger applications and networks. The design philosophy targets keeping ledgers distributed and making smart contracts safe, particularly for enterprise use.

Sawtooth simplifies blockchain application development by separating the core system from the application domain. Application developers can specify the business rules appropriate for their application, using the language of their choice, without needing to know the underlying design of the core system.

Sawtooth is also highly modular. This modularity enables enterprises and consortia to make policy decisions that they are best equipped to make. Sawtooth’s core design allows applications to choose the transaction rules, permissioning, and consensus algorithms that support their unique business needs.

What is Hyperledger Sawtooth Seth?

The primary goal of the Sawtooth-Ethereum integration project, which is also known as “Seth” is to add support for running Ethereum Virtual Machine Smart Contracts to the Hyperledger Sawtooth Platform.

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Smart Contracts can be deployed to Sawtooth using the Seth Transaction family. The Seth Transaction Family enables the creation and execution of smart contracts. It integrates the Hyperledger Burrow implementation of the EVM into the Hyperledger Sawtooth Framework using the Sawtooth Transaction Processor SDK.

For those familiar with Ethereum Geth (Go-Ethereum) client, you will find out that Sawtooth Seth client replicates the Ethereum JSON RPC API.

Seth is composed of three components

Seth Client
Seth-TP Transaction Processor
Seth-RPC Server

For more details on JSON RPC API, check out https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JSON-RPC

Do note that Seth is not a complete Ethereum implementation. The Sawtooth platform has made fundamental design decisions that differ from those made by the Ethereum platform. The specified differences can be found under Sources/References

What is Truffle?

Truffle is often considered the most popular Ethereum development framework. Truffle does a lot of things for the developer. It is a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for Ethereum, aiming to make life as an Ethereum developer easier. We won’t be going through Truffle. Point of introducing Truffle is to share with you that one can build smart contracts with Solidity and enjoy Truffle and its related capabilities and yet deploy the end product (i.e., your Smart Contract) onto Hyperledger Sawtooth — this to me is pretty awesome! For more information on truffle, please check out https://truffleframework.com/

Step by Step Setup Guide

I am using Ubuntu 16.04. You will need git and Docker installed.

Do a git clone of sawtooth-seth

2. Build the Sawtooth Seth

This process will take 10 – 15 minutes.

Run Sawtooth Seth

docker run -v $(pwd)/docs:/project/sawtooth-seth/docs seth-build-docs

Verify if the components are running correctly

curl http://0.0.0.0:8080/blocks

curl http://0.0.0.0:3030 -d ‘{“jsonrpc”: “2.0”, “id”: 1, “method”: “eth_blockNumber”}’ -H “Content-Type: application/json”

Creating an Account. Generating a Key Pair

In order to interact with Seth, we need to create an external account on the network. Creating an account is equivalent to generating a new private key that Seth can understand. Seth accepts secp256k1 private keys

docker exec -it seth bash

openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp256k1 | openssl ec -out mykey.pem -aes128

Now we are ready to set up the account on the network. To do this, we need to use the seth command. From the prompt where you generated the key, run:

seth account import mykey.pem myalias

seth account create myalias –wait

seth show account {address}

Write the Smart Contract

Once you have an account created, you can use it to deploy EVM smart contracts. To demonstrate how to deploy and call contracts, we will be using the following Solidity contract, which is based loosely on the IntegerKey Transaction Family. Solidity is a high-level language for defining contracts that compiles to EVM byte code for deployment. To follow along with this guide, you should create a new file with this contract:

pragma solidity ^0.4.0;

contract intkey {

mapping (uint => uint) intmap;

event Set(uint key, uint value);

function set(uint key, uint value) {

intmap[key] = value;

Set(key, value);

}

function inc(uint key){

intmap[key] = intmap[key] + 1;

}

function dec(uint key){

intmap[key] = intmap[key] – 1;

}

function get(uint key) constant returns (uint retVal) {

return intmap[key];

}

Save this contract in a file called “contract.sol” in your working directory. If you are working with the development environment described in :doc`./getting_started` you should save this file in the sawtooth-core/ directory on your host so that it is available within the seth container.

Before we can deploy this contract, we have to compile it. The seth client expects that the contract will be passed as a hex-encoded byte array. We can use the Solidity compiler solc to create it. If you followed the Getting Started instructions, this tool is already installed in the seth container we created earlier. Connect to the seth container as explained there. If not, we assume you have it installed locally.

$ solc –bin contract.sol

======= contract.sol:intkey =======

Binary:

…byte array here…

In place of {contract} you should insert the blob of hex that you saved from earlier. This will create a new contract creation transaction and submit it to the validator.

If everything works, a new contract account will be created and the client will print the address of the newly created contract account along with some additional execution information. To confirm the contract was deployed, you can run:

seth show account {address}

Calling Contracts

To call the deployed contract we need the address where the contract is deployed and the input data for the contract call. The address was printed when the contract was deployed. Constructing the input for the contract is a little harder.

Solidity uses an Application Binary Interface or ABI to determine which function in your contract to run and what the function call’s arguments are. There are many tools available for abstracting the creation of the input data for a contract call. One option for generating the input data that is compatible with the seth client is the ethereumjs-abi library. If you are using the development environment described earlier, this is already installed in the seth docker container.

To use this library to call a function in contract, you can use the simpleEncode. The following shows how to call the set() function in the contract we deployed earlier with arguments 19 and 42:

$ node

> var abi = require(‘ethereumjs-abi’)

> abi.simpleEncode(“set(uint,uint)”, “0x13”, “0x2a”).toString(“hex”)

…byte array here…

To call our contract and run set(19,42), run:

seth contract call –wait {address} {input}

In place of {input} you should insert the blob of hex formatted according to the contract’s ABI that we created above. If everything works, the client will state that transaction was succesful and print the transaction id. To verify that the message call was successful, you can do:

seth show receipt {transaction-id}

seth contract create –wait myalias {contract}

Conclusion

Imagine having the best of both worlds — building smart contracts with Solidity, originally intended for EVM — and deploying it onto Hyperledger Sawtooth. Portability is the key differentiator here which explains why I love building smart contracts with Solidity and deploying it onto Sawtooth via Seth.

I am happy to answer any questions you might have on Hyperledger Sawtooth and Solidity or any blockchain related questions. Drop me a line at nathan.mk.aw@gmail.com and/or connect with me on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/awnathan/

Sources/References:

https://github.com/hyperledger/sawtooth-seth/blob/master/docs/Dockerfile

https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/seth/releases/latest/seth_developers_guide/getting_started.html#getting-seth

https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/introduction.html

https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle

May 24

Love6

One Year Later: Interoperability & Standardization Shine at Consensus

By Hyperledger Blog, Events, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Quilt, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Image: The Hyperledger booth at Consensus 2018

Interoperability and standardization took center stage (literally) last week in New York at Consensus, when organizations like FedEx explained that both Ethereum and Hyperledger technology power their logistics solution and that it was a goal of theirs to be agnostic when choosing ledger technologies. Then there was the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which announced their 1.0 specification that many blockchain developer communities, including Hyperledger Sawtooth, plan to be compatible with in the near future.

It seems as though our hard work at Hyperledger has been paying off and Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf believes we’re now seeing evolution beyond the basic technology questions to more involved discussions about scale, interoperability and governance. In fact, he met with Steven Norton of The Wall Street Journal during Consensus to discuss just that. Brian told Steven:

“Now that we have running systems and there is real value on these different networks, figuring out how to wire them together is a greater priority now than it was a few years ago. But even outside the blockchain space, interoperability is always a process, never a destination. People are starting to finally ask how do we get out of a simplistic mode of saying everyone should all be on the same public ledger, and instead get to a more sophisticated set of questions, like what does interoperability actually mean. It might mean wiring these things together with common software underneath. It might also mean common software on top.”

The discussions around interoperability were a significant contrast to what we saw one year ago at Consensus, when many were just trying to wrap their minds around the technology capabilities and experimentation was in full swing. The idea of different blockchains interacting with one another still seemed like several years away. At that time, we only saw a glimpse of potential possibilities for interoperability when the HACERA team created a fun chess game called Dutchess at the Building Blocks Hackathon that used a combination of technologies like Ethereum, Solidity, Quorum, and Hyperledger Sawtooth.

Jonathan Levi from HACERA explaining different technologies powering Dutchess

At Hyperledger, we envision a world of many chains, some public like the crypto-currencies and some permissioned like you will see in healthcare settings. That’s why we focus on developing the common frameworks for building all kinds of chains. Our diverse developer communities remain diligent in helping the industry advance interoperability above the layer of the DLT, and are on constant look out for simple and open cross-blockchain approaches. An early example of this was the integration between the Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Burrow projects last year. As a result of that integration, simple EVM smart contracts can be deployed to Hyperledger Sawtooth using the “Seth” (Sawtooth Ethereum) Transaction Family.

“This integration validates that positioning and establishes a strong upstream-downstream relationship between the Sawtooth and Burrow projects. Successful open source endeavours are community driven, collaborative efforts and this linkage between the Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Burrow teams reinforces that ethos.” – Adam Ludvik, Bitwise IO & Casey Kuhlman, Monax

Building on that development, the Hyperledger Sawtooth community released a feature called Dynamic Consensus, which goes beyond pluggable consensus to allow networks to change consensus on the fly. Hyperledger Sawtooth supports three consensus protocols right now and two more are in development. Also in development, is a change to the Sawtooth consensus API that will allow consensus providers written in a variety of languages. This follows a similar pattern to Sawtooth’s support for smart contracts in a variety of languages. This expands the breadth of possible consensus algorithm andprotocols that can be easily coupled to Sawtooth. A more recent example is the Hyperledger Fabric community, which has been working hard to create a bridge to the Ethereum community, so that developers can write EVM smart contracts on Fabric. The hope is that our community will continue to tighten integration and interoperability across Hyperledger projects and beyond, allowing a greater number of available options for developers. We hope that even more developers can start to think out of the box, connecting blockchains, and doing it securely. The problem of working with more than one technology stack is no longer a technical one.

Community Architect, Tracy Kuhrt presenting at the Hyperledger NYC Meetup after Consensus

Hyperledger was established to bring together related, and even competing, technologies with the expectation that the common governance will lead to interoperability and gradual consolidation. Interoperability will be essential to the widespread adoption of blockchain technology because that is what will help the blockchain business ecosystem standardize and thrive. As Brian mentioned to The Wall Street Journal, standards are hard, but getting everyone to agree will end up being the bigger challenge:

“I think the tech is ready for the volume of transactions people want to throw at it and the flexibility of programming models that they want. It’s really the governance. It’s hard enough for one organization to launch any new product. Getting multiple parties to agree on anything — like a time of day for a meeting, let alone a common application — will end up being a bigger challenge. Standards are hard. These things are alive and humming like a benzene ring. They depend upon everybody running the right thing at all times. That I think operationally will be the big challenge.” – Brian Behlendorf

We look forward to the rest of 2018 and all the progress to be made with interoperability. We hope you join us in the effort by contributing to Hyperledger projects.

You can plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. As always, you can keep up with what’s new with Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.

May 02

Love6

Developer Showcase Series: Hitesh Fuletra, Save-On-Foods

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Fabric

Image: Hitesh Fuletra, Save-On-Foods – a division of the Overwaitea Food Group

Next up in our Developer Showcase blog series is Hitesh Fuletra, a system analyst at Save-On-Foods – a division of the Overwaitea Food Group. A quick reminder that this blog series serves to highlight the work and motivations of developers, users and researchers collaborating on Hyperledger’s incubated projects. Let’s see what Hitesh has to say!

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

Read and understand first what blockchain is, its purpose and how it works. I started learning with the help of IBM tutorials.

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

I am working on a major IT transformation project at one of Canada’s grocery chains as an integration expert. Being in integration technology for the last 12 years, I always came across very large volumes of data/information flowing between systems and a large amount of transaction processing in microseconds. Though integration has solved many problems, it is still facing new challenges as data flowing across systems always changes its nature based on new technologies.

I started reading about blockchain in 2015 thanks to Bitcoin. I think blockchain can play an important role in minimizing the pain system integration is facing these days by providing simpler, robust and cheaper solutions for transaction processing and data distribution.

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

Encourage more real-time use of Hyperledger platform. Build more developer friendly tools and provide documentation/user guide/training for newbies.

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

For me, the most interesting projects are Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Burrow.

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

Fraud prevention, and more security to personal records/data, bulk transaction processing in less time than existing technologies. Even Wall Street has started using blockchain: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-20/blockchain-gets-a-wall-street-win-we-know-the-thing-works-now

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in 5 years?

Blockchain is gaining more acceptance and I see Hyperledger as a powerful platform, which provides an ecosystem of tools to help engineers develop more and more solutions using blockchain. I have no doubt that in a short time, Hyperledger will become the major platform used widely for developing blockchain based solutions.

Mar 28

Love1

(3.28.18) CoinDesk: Hyperledger Tech Heats Up Ahead of Software Debuts

By Hyperledger Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth, News

Just six minutes.

That’s how long Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf had to get former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet up to speed on blockchain. Spurred by a special request from the nation’s lawmakers, Behlendorf was one of multiple blockchain experts called to the country to talk about the merits of the technology and the ways in which it could modernize the copper-rich nation’s mining supply chain.

More here.

Dec 21

Love13

Onward and Upward for Hyperledger in 2018

By Brian Behlendorf Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Chaintool, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Quilt, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s beneficial to look back and reflect on the progress we have made, and where we will see evolution and growth in the new year. This year, the world has acknowledged distributed ledgers and smart contracts as transformative technologies with tremendous potential to impact how business is conducted in many industries. Within Hyperledger, the technology foundations have now been set. In the coming year, that will turn into more production software releases, real world implementations, and the first real business returns on our collective intellectual and financial investment.

Below are a few observations from the year, milestones and thoughts on what will come in 2018.

Blockchain maturation and more production implementations

Companies large and small, IT vendors and end-user organizations, consortiums and NGOs, everyone took notice of Hyperledger in 2017 and made moves to get involved. This was evident in the ever increasing Hyperledger membership, which nearly doubled in size. We sold out of our Premier memberships at 21 total, adding eight new companies just this year including SAP, American Express, Daimler, Change Healthcare, NEC, Cisco, Tradeshift and Baidu. Hyperledger now has support from 197 organizations, and remains the fastest growing open source project ever hosted by The Linux Foundation. This has given Hyperledger a very solid footing financially, enabling us to double the resources we can apply towards building and supporting the community in 2018.
We have grown our Associate Member ranks to include organizations as diverse as Mercy Corps, the National Association of Realtors, the Illinois Blockchain Initiative, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. These relationships are key to extending Hyperledger’s reach into different sectors and environments.
Attesting to our focus on developing code suitable for enterprise use, this year saw the launch of the first production ready Hyperledger blockchain framework, Hyperledger Fabric 1.0. This was a true community effort pulling together contributions from more than 100 different developers and 30 different companies. As one result, we have 45 members listed in our Vendor Directory, providing products and services based on Hyperledger technology.
We have seen substantial uptick in POCs, pilots and production implementations of Hyperledger technologies, many of which are being tracked at the PoC Tracker on the Hyperledger website. Just a few examples of projects building in Hyperledger code include:
- The Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Ubin, implementing an RTGS system;
- the soon-to-be-production diamond supply chain tracking system implemented by Everledger, SAP and IBM;
- and the Plastic Bank, a plastics recycling initiative.

In 2018, we will see:

more 1.0 milestones made next year by various Hyperledger projects;
more production deployments: for example, Change Healthcare, has announced an early 2018 go-live for their claims processing blockchain built on Hyperledger Fabric;
a growing Hyperledger staff and presence at events, creating more content, supporting a growing set of projects and working groups;
and more membership growth. We are reaching out to a broader set of industries than ever, and are deepening our relationships with our existing members.

The fast expanding developer and end-user community will continue to grow

Demand for developers, and developer interest in Hyperledger, has exploded. We are now seeing sold-out Hyperledger meetups in dozens of cities, strong attendance at our semi-monthly HackFests held around the world, thousands of participants on our email and chat networks, non-stop requests for speakers at conferences, and of course more and more code flowing into our repositories.
We launched the first Hyperledger online training course this year: Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies. Currently, there are 44,966 total enrollments, and 1,074 learners have completed the course with a passing grade. We have an average of 2,500 new enrollments per week. The course is second only in growth to the original intro to Linux operating system course launched by The Linux Foundation. We have now launched a Training and Education Working Group to involve core maintainers and other volunteers in the development of additional courseware.
150 people participated in the Hyperledger Member Summit in November in Singapore, representing 83 different member companies.

In 2018, we will see:

the development of additional training courses and certification options;
more frequent and larger face to face developer gatherings;
and more developer activity across additional Hyperledger projects.

Integration, standards and interoperability will take center focus

In 2017, the community started exploring integrations among different Hyperledger technologies like Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Burrow. We’re betting this collaboration and exploration will continue next year. The Hyperledger technical steering committee also accepted four new projects into incubation in 2017 including Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Composer and Hyperledger Quilt. Quilt, in particular, is focused on enabling interoperability in a multi-blockchain world. We are anticipating that more such projects will call Hyperledger home next year.
The Hyperledger Scalability and Performance Working Group was launched in June to facilitate important conversations. Various other efforts such as the new Blockchain Interoperability Alliance were created to advance standards that will hopefully promote a greater degree of connectivity between different blockchains in 2017.

In 2018, we will see:

The industry get a lot more serious about interoperability above the layer of the DLT, and looking for simple and open cross-blockchain approaches, leading them to Hyperledger Quilt and the rest of our community;
and our projects explore integration and interoperability with each other even further, allowing a greater number of options to be available to developers.

We’re proud of the work our vibrant and diverse community has accomplished this year. We have made great strides and could not be more thankful to everyone who has played a part in this success. It goes without saying the stakes can be even higher in open source, it’s a balance of creating a welcoming, collaborative environment and at the same time making sure everyone gets a say and all voices are heard. We strongly believe the open governance model that Hyperledger naturally inherited from The Linux Foundation has been a crucial part of the continued success of the project.

Finally, you can stay up to date with all Hyperledger news here or follow us on Twitter. We hold regular hackfests for Hyperledger, so be sure to check out the events page and join us for the next one. You can also plug into the Hyperledger Community at github, Rocket.Chat, the wiki or our mailing list.

Here’s to a successful 2018!

Nov 06

Love8

VIDEO: Hyperledger, A Greenhouse for Blockchain Projects

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Chaintool, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Hyperledger hosts multiple technology projects, all advancing business blockchain frameworks and modules through open source collaboration. Currently, Hyperledger hosts 6 open source frameworks and 3 open source blockchain tools.

To introduce the concept of blockchain technologies and the Hyperledger organization, we created an explainer video illustrating Hyperledger as a greenhouse for these open source blockchain projects. Intended to serve as a starting point suitable for all audiences wanting to learn about Hyperledger and business blockchain technologies, we hope this 3-minute explainer video will shed light on the following:

1. A distributed ledger is a common system of record with no central authority.

A ledger contains a record of your transactions, along with other transactions in the network. Distributed ledgers are multi-party databases with no central trusted authority. Blockchains can be used to record promises, trades, transactions or simply items we never want to disappear.

2. It’s vitally important to know that your copy of the ledger is identical to everyone else’s

All businesses participating in a commercial ecosystem need a ledger to contain a record of transactions. As a result, across the global market there are ledgers that organizations and individuals alike must trust. Mirrored exactly across all nodes in a given network, distributed ledgers allow everyone in an ecosystem to keep a copy of the common system of record, free from discrepancies. Nothing can ever be erased or edited; parties can only add to the ledger.

3. Hyperledger provides the underlying open source software, on top of which anyone can set up blockchain apps and services to meet business needs.

Hyperledger building and promoting enterprise grade, open source business blockchain technologies, including distributed ledgers, smart contract engines, client libraries, graphical interfaces, utility libraries, and sample applications. Built under technical governance and open collaboration, individual developers, service and solution providers, government associations, corporate members and end users alike are all invited to participate in the development and promotion of these thriving technologies.

4. Hyperledger is a global, cross-industry, collaborative open source consortium.

With 170+ member organizations working across industries and competitive lines, and 400+ code contributors, Hyperledger is the fastest growing consortium in the history of The Linux Foundation’s collaborative projects. Just like you see in this greenhouse, with the help of The Linux Foundation and Hyperledger’s open source approach, everyone does their part to ensure the success of the whole, nurturing these blockchain ecosystems for evolution, expansion and continued growth.

The most renowned leaders in finance, healthcare and supply chain across the globe trust Hyperledger to build their business blockchain technologies. Who will you trust with your trust network?

We encourage developers to join our efforts on Hyperledger via github, Rocket.Chat, the wiki or the mailing lists. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.

Watch and Share the video:

Sep 26

Love7

Hyperledger Gains 10 New Members

By Hyperledger Announcements, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Growth in open blockchain consortium doubles over past year with more than 160 members

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (September 26, 2017) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, announced today that 10 new organizations have joined the project. As a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort, Hyperledger incubates eight business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies including Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Sawtooth, among others.

“The immense growth we’ve seen this year signifies an acceptance and understanding of Hyperledger blockchain solutions for business,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “These new diverse members have agreed to contribute their leadership and energy to the Hyperledger community. We thank them for their support and validation as we drive towards more PoCs, pilots and production uses cases of Hyperledger technologies in the enterprise.”

Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology. The latest General members include: AMIHAN, ChongQin Xichain Technologies, DLT Labs, GameCredits, Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX), Medicalchain and ScanTrust.

Hyperledger supports an open community that values contributions and participation from various entities. As such, pre-approved non-profits, open source projects and government entities can join Hyperledger at no cost as Associate members. Several Associate members joined this month including Mercy Corps, Taiwan Fintech Association and Zhejiang University.

New member quotes:

AMIHAN

“Amihan is proud to be the first Filipino company to join Hyperledger,” said Winston Damarillo, Chairman of Amihan Global Strategies. “We believe that blockchain and smart contracts are the key to preparing Southeast Asia for the digital age, and we are committed to working with the Hyperledger community to push the limits of blockchain technology. We look forward to working with our clients – some of the largest enterprises in ASEAN – to transform finance, healthcare, retail, and customer loyalty in one of the fastest-growing regions of the world.”

DLT Labs

“At DLT Labs, our corporate purpose is to create, integrate, and support dynamic distributed ledger solutions that equip our clients with the tools to capitalize on unrealized potential within their businesses,” said Loudon Owen, Chairman and CEO of DLT Labs. “With over 30 dedicated in-house Blockchain developers and over 20 proprietary enterprise products, DLT Labs has formed globe-spanning partnerships with leading edge consultancies, manufacturers, financial institution and innovative service providers. Our global presence spans the United States, the United Kingdom, China, India, Canada and Singapore. DLT is excited at the opportunity to join Hyperledger’s nexus of leaders, creators, and dreamers, and looks forward to forming long-lasting relationships with the forefront of blockchain innovators.”

GameCredits

“We are excited to join the company of industry leaders in Hyperledger,” said Alex Migitko, COO, GameCredits. “GameCredits is focused on a unique blockchain use case, catering to the $100 billion gaming industry and its massive audience of almost every third person on earth, governed by complex relations between various stakeholders. Our solutions will be of immense interest to adjacent industries and we believe we will be able to make a unique contribution to the alliance.”

Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX)

“We are today at the beginning of the blockchain revolution, witnessing in real time an explosion of ideas, experiments and projects that aim to completely redesign global capital markets for the new era,” said Nick Cowan, CEO, Gibraltar Stock Exchange. “The Gibraltar Stock Exchange’s membership in Hyperledger provides us with an exciting opportunity to connect, share ideas and collaborate with like minded innovators and industry leaders, without boundaries, with the aim of building consensus for the new global framework.”

Medicalchain

“Medicalchain puts health records back into the hands of patients, and that’s not possible without the secure storage and transfer of data. Using Hyperledger, Medicalchain will allow patients to control permissions to their health records – who gets access to them, what information they get access to and for how long,” said Dr. Albeyatti, co-founder of Medicalchain. “We are thrilled to join the Hyperledger community and will continue working to bring blockchain technology to the healthcare industry.”

ScanTrust

“Today’s connected consumers are demanding more transparency and with global supply chains becoming more complex, achieving this a challenging task,” said Nathan Anderson, CEO and Co-Founder, ScanTrust. “ScanTrust secure identifiers connect physical goods to the internet for enhanced supply chain security; by adding open blockchain technology to this foundation, brands will be able to protect and track their products using mobile phone authentication. We look forward to collaborating with the Hyperledger community to develop a scalable, enterprise-grade blockchain framework.”

To see a full list of member companies, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/members. If you’re interested in joining Hyperledger as a member company, please visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/join

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

Sep 12

Love6

Meet the TSC: Arnaud Le Hors, IBM

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As promised, we’re kicking off a new blog series that focuses on the motivations and backgrounds of the individuals that make up Hyperledger’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

The TSC is a group of community-elected developers drawn from a pool of active participants and is a core element of Hyperledger’s Open Governance model. The model has worked for The Linux Foundation for 15+ years and therefore has been purposefully passed down to each open source project to offer an even playing field for all those involved – coming as close as possible to pure technical meritocracy as one can get. The TSC is responsible for all technical decisions – from which features to add, how to add them and when, among others.

With that background, let’s introduce Hyperledger TSC member, Arnaud Le Hors from IBM. Let’s see what he had to say about Hyperledger, his role in the TSC and the community!

Describe your current role, background and why you wanted to be a part of the Hyperledger TSC?

I’m Senior Technical Staff Member of Web & Blockchain Open Technologies at IBM. I’ve been working on open technologies for over 25 years, focusing on standards and open source development, both as a staff member of the X Consortium and W3C, and as a representative for IBM. I was editor of several key web specifications including HTML and DOM and was a pioneer of open source with the release of libXpm in 1990. I participated in several prominent open source projects including the X Window System and Xerces, the Apache XML parser. I currently am the main representative for IBM at W3C, an elected member of the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee, and a contributor to Hyperledger Fabric.

My main goal is for Hyperledger to not merely be successful technically but be successful as a true Open Source project with an active, vibrant, and diverse community. There are too many projects out there that claim to be open source but fail to have an open governance. In my role on the TSC I will continue to strive to make this community truly open.

Arnaud Le Hors, Senior Technical Staff Member of Web & Blockchain Open Technologies at IBM

How are you or your company currently using Hyperledger technologies or how do you plan to?

IBM Blockchain offering is based on Hyperledger Fabric. After a period of development of proof of concepts we’ve now entered a phase in which we see more and more projects going into production. Some of these like Everledger and Maersk have been highly publicized already with the tracking of diamonds and shipping containers respectively. What I find interesting is that these projects show how broadly applicable blockchain technology really is. This goes way beyond cryptocurrencies.

What are the benefits of Hyperledger’s open governance model?

The power of Open Source is to make it possible for people with different backgrounds and skills to come together and work collaboratively to everybody’s benefit. Everyone gets more out of the project than they individually contribute. This model however only reaches its full potential with an open governance where all contributors are treated equally and have a say in the direction of the project. Without open governance, developers are merely treated as cheap resources willing to give their time and IP without any say as to where the project goes. Sadly, many projects typically led by big corporations do function like that. As I said earlier, it is my goal for Hyperledger to be truly open and part of my role at IBM has been to help our development team to switch from a closed development environment to open source. This doesn’t just happen. One needs to understand what it takes and apply themselves to it.

What’s the most important technical milestone for Hyperledger to reach by the end of 2017?

We’ve already seen the release of Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 earlier this year, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Iroha are working towards their own 1.0 release. I think it would be a great achievement to see those three projects, which were the first to start within Hyperledger, reach that major milestone by the end of the year.

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

Blockchain is a new technology. In many respects everybody’s still learning so it is a great time to get started. As more and more companies launch projects leveraging blockchain they will be seeking developers with the needed skills. Those who already worked on developing these skills will become valuable resources. Because all of the Hyperledger technologies are open source there is no cost to getting started. It is merely a matter of being willing to invest your time. Practically speaking, I would advise people to start by familiarizing themselves with the different projects to get some general understanding of the characteristics of the different frameworks. They all include documentation and tutorials that are can be used to get started.

What’s the one thing you hope to accomplish by being a part of Hyperledger’s TSC?

As mentioned before, if there is one thing I hope to accomplish it is to continue driving the project towards being truly open, with not only code in open source but also with an open governance. For example, last year, I took a leading role in the development of the Incubation exit criteria. These are criteria the TSC uses to gauge whether a project is ready to move out of Incubation into Active status. The fact that the criteria we defined are focusing on the maturity of the project – how the project is run, how diverse the community is, etc – rather than the maturity of the software that is developed is a reflection of that goal.

What’s a missing feature or spec that you hope Hyperledger can add in the soon future?

As we see more and more projects reach their 1.0 release, I hope we get more cross pollination happening between projects. For instance, an effort was recently put into integrating Borrow – a permissioned Ethereum virtual machine – with Sawtooth. I hope we get to see more of that kind of efforts happening moving forward.

What’s the biggest struggle or challenge you see Hyperledger having to overcome?

As understanding of the different major components of a blockchain framework improves, with help from the Architecture Working Group, it would be great to be able to identify pieces that can be externalized and shared by the different frameworks rather than have every project host its own. This is however not an easy task and with each project focusing on advancing its own framework it is difficult to get resources allocated to this kind of cross project effort. Once all the projects become more mature it should be easier to find resources for this but it will be harder to make significant changes to frameworks that have already been deployed in production.

What use cases are you most excited about with Hyperledger and/or blockchain?

Voting. Blockchain provides a distributed, secure, and audit-able record that fits perfectly the need of voting processes. What is more important than protecting our democracies?

Sep 06

Love8

ABCs of Open Governance

Today, most people understand the concept of Open Source – certainly we expect most readers of this blog understand it. View the code, use the code, copy the code, change the code, and, depending on the license, contribute back changes or not.

What many people don’t get, and something we here at Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation pride ourselves on doing well, is Open Governance.

The Linux Foundation, and all of our 60+ open source projects, are not-for-profits building the greatest shared R&D investment in history. Open Governance is central to this promise.

Open Governance means that technical decisions -– which features to add, how to add them and when, among others – for a given Open Source project or projects are made by a group of community-elected developers drawn from a pool of active participants. It is as close to the ideal of pure technical meritocracy as one can get and we strive continuously to reach that ideal.

Hyperledger recently concluded the 2017-2018 Technical Steering Committee (TSC) election, and so we thought it an opportune time to explain the ABCs of Open Governance. Please note that this is one Open Governance implementation and clearly not the only way to do it, but rather one proven and effective way.

What does the Hyperledger TSC do?

The TSC charter spells out the group’s responsibilities.

The TL;DR is that the TSC is the ultimate authority on technical decisions. This includes which new projects are admitted to Hyperledger , which current projects graduate from Incubation to Active , and the rules by which each Hyperledger project will operate.

Participation in Hyperledger through becoming a Contributor and/or Maintainer is open to anyone.
Hyperledger Charter Section 4C

As a developer or maintainer, this translates into one thing: trust. You know how decisions will be made and the process by which people will be selected to make these decisions. Hyperledger is vendor-neutral and technical contributions are based on meritocracy. We will always remain immune to the commercial interests of any single company.

The TSC election process consists of three simple steps:

Identification of eligible participants
Nominations
Voting

Who is really eligible to be on the TSC?

The charter spells out that the TSC voting members shall consist of eleven (11) elected Contributors or Maintainers chosen by the Active Contributors.

So, how do you determine an active contributor, you may ask? As part of the current election, every project maintainer and Working Group leader was asked to provide a list of all the people that have contributed to their work in the past year. In addition, a review of all code and other contributions was conducted.

This year, 424 active contributors were identified as eligible to participate in the TSC election process.

Bring It (your nomination that is)

The Linux Foundation maintains an expert staff with decades of combined experience managing the operations of large scale, Openly Governed Open Source projects.

For Hyperledger, the Sr. Program Manager Todd Benzies ensures the trains run on time.

Below is Todd’s email calling for TSC nominations:

This nominating process produced 32 candidates for the 11 TSC spots. These 32 come from 20 different organizations, across a spectrum of industries, from technology vendors to foundations to end users from a variety of industries. They include people who work at Hyperledger members and non-members and some are standing as individuals.

A policy whose importance is hard to overstate is that anyone elected to a seat on the TSC is elected as a person unbound to the company for which they presently work. Should any TSC member during their tenure leave an employer for another, this would have zero impact on their standing as member of the Hyperledger TSC.

Cast your vote

Here is Todd’s email sent to the same list announcing the nominees and opening voting.

The arrow highlights one of the things that we’ve learned along the way as a trick to the trade of running open governance well. The voting system has to be unquestionably secure and fair (something by now truly everyone can relate to…).

We use the Condorcet Internet Voting System to safeguard the privacy of this election and voting process. CIVS can only be accessed by authorized voters, who receive a unique URL tied to their email address. Voters rank a set of possible choices and individual voter rankings are combined into an anonymous overall ranking of the choices. One vote is allowed per IP address.

Results

This process yields a fairly and openly-elected technical decision making body pulled from the community that cares about Hyperledger. We know they care not because they said so, not because the company they work for has joined Hyperledger, but because they invested their time to make contributions to Hyperledger code bases. Or, as Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf says, “it’s a do -ocracy.”

Meet the New Hyperledger TSC (listed in alphabetical order)

Arnaud Le Hors
Baohua Yang
Binh Nguyen
Christopher Ferris
Dan Middleton
Greg Haskins
Hart Montgomery
Jonathan Levi (new)
Kelly Olson (new)
Mic Bowman
Nathan George (new)

If you’re interested in learning more about the Hyperledger TSC and its elected members, we’ll be kicking off a “Meet the TSC” blog series in the coming weeks. Be sure to look out for it!

You can plug into the community at github , Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list .

Previous 1 2 3 Next