Category

Hyperledger Fabric

May 17
4

Developer Showcase Series: Saurabh Tiwari, Pegadroid

By | Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Next up in our Developer Showcase blog series is Saurabh Tiwari, founder of Pegadroid. A quick reminder that this blog series serves to highlight the work and motivations of developers, users and researchers collaborating on Hyperledger’s projects. Let’s see what he has to say!

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

  1. a) It is important not to get carried away with the blockchain hype. We’ve met many people lately, who just want to get blockchain into their projects without understanding its real implications, use cases and potential. Not every business fits into the blockchain model and therefore developers must first explore and discuss with experts before jumping into implementing a solution.
  2. b) I would recommend all the developers to get onto rocket chat right from day one. It is the only place to engage with the community and get your questions answered, which makes on-boarding quite a smooth experience.

Saurabh Tiwari, Founder of Pegadroid

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?

Our product brings innovation into recruitment, by leveraging state of the art blockchain technology for onboarding organizations, partners and candidates to build an enterprise community which is trusted, secure and transparent. Our platform stores all the candidate profiles and documents as assets over blockchain, which are then verified/endorsed by the auditing partners. These assets and endorsements are shared with recruiters. The data is created by the community for the community. It helps recruiters save lot of time and money on background verification, as well as offers rewards and incentives for our auditing partners. We also provide  an enterprise collaboration platform called Slabber, which can be used to effectively communicate, share content, schedule events, process interview feedbacks, create discussion forums, sign contracts and everything else important from the recruitment point of view.

The traditional background verification model has mostly been centralized, all these years. Most of the data is replicated and stored with different auditing companies, which leads to data discrepancies and higher costs to recruiters. Blockchain enabled us to think differently, and we realized that a decentralized community can do wonders. We did enough research, talked to many industry experts and then built a prototype. The results were amazing. Later, we decided to convert it into a full fledged product.

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

  1. a) Stabilization of Hyperledger Fabric
  2. b) Extending containers with Kubernetes integration
  3. c) More documentation
  4. d) Campaigns & marketing

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

The two most important ones are –

  1. a) Refugee Identity Crisis –  We have seen few incidents recently, where instability in a country led it’s people to cross borders and take shelter in other countries. Their identity is lost. In some cases, they are not allowed to return to their home countries due to lost identities. Having a shared blockchain ledger of this data across globe can possibly help in such cases.
  2. b)  Healthcare industry – Counterfeit  drugs have been a major problem in all countries. I feel, blockchain can help control nation’s drug supply and can certainly improve the situation.

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

Hyperledger is a trend setter and is rapidly evolving over time. It is already adopted  by many organizations. I am sure, it will penetrate every business where security, integrity and trust are the top priorities. Blockchain can do wonders in the next five years.

What technology could you not live without?

Every technology has emerged for a purpose, which is to make our lives better. Technologies combined with people is a powerhouse, which can resolve many real word problems. It is hard to imagine life without technology.

 

 

 

 

May 10
2

Enterprise Blockchain Demos & Presentations at Consensus

By | Blog, Events, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Next week we will be busy at Consensus, happening in New York May 14-16. Consensus is a great event for our members to set the stage and speak to what’s happening in the Hyperledger community, as production blockchain deployments have been heavily increasing. Many members will demonstrate applications of distributed ledger technology for financial services, supply chain, identity management and various other use cases.

These demos highlight true collaboration and maturity of Hyperledger technologies across many industries. As we head farther into 2018, we’re excited to see how these frameworks continue to evolve and improve business processes across many other industries.

Hyperledger members will showcase the following demos and presentations at the Hyperledger booth (#315):

Monday, May 14

10:20am: IntellectEU – Enterprise Blockchain integration with IoT devices and back office systems by Hanna Zubko, CEO and Paulo Rodrigues, Global Business Developer Manager and CEO Portuguese Offices

This presentation will cover a real customer case leveraging Blockchain technology to offer a new insurance product: a flexible pay per mile insurance based on the real car mileage and condition, calculating the insurance premium rate and quoting the offer based on the accumulated data received from the IoT device installed in the car. This pilot project is based on Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 and IntellectEU’s Catalyst integration solution. Catalyst serves as a hub for connecting the insurance database, emulated IoT device, end user application and the ledger itself. Catalyst listens to the changes on all data sources and based on the business rules applies the corresponding logic.

12:30pm: SecureKey – Using Hyperledger Tracking to Make Frictionless Digital Identity Possible by Matt Jaksic, Business Development

SecureKey will demonstrate Verified.Me, its digital identity network launching later this year that will put consumers in control of how they validate their identities. Collaboratively created by leading organizations across many different sectors including Canada’s leading banks, Verified.Me will enable consumers to privately, securely and conveniently share information from trusted providers such as banks, telecommunications companies and governments. The platform is designed to empower the consumer by giving them the ability to explicitly choose what information to share, when to share it and with whom. Come see how Verified.Me can change the way we get things done faster and securely online, in person and on the phone!

1:00pm: Thales eSecurity – Enterprise ready high security blockchain by Jon Geater, Chief Technology Officer and John Velissarios, Managing Director at Accenture

Accenture has developed an enterprise ready blockchain solution with enhanced cryptographic security from Thales eSecurity Hardware Security Module. It provides an immutable audit trail proving hardware, software and documentation authenticity and compliance across supply chains. Using CryptoSeal and FPGA fingerprinting technology, they are able to give materials in the supply chain a unique identity to prove authenticity. This combination of technologies allows someone to securely and transparently track all kinds of transactions, between OEMs, suppliers, manufacturers and customers. This dramatically reduces time delays, added costs, and human error that affect the surety of transactions underpinning our supply chains today.

3:00pm: Omnitude – Seamless Blockchain Integration by Martyn Brougham, COO Americas, and James Worthington, Blockchain Consultant

Omnitude is a middleware plug and play blockchain built on Hyperledger Fabric, for use across the whole spectrum of enterprise and eCommerce platforms and allows eCommerce businesses to adopt blockchain quickly and efficiently, without needing to replace current systems. The presentation will show how Omnitude allows eCommerce and enterprise businesses to adopt blockchain quickly and efficiently, without needing to replace current systems.

3:50pm: DLT Labs – DLT Wallet by David Freeman, Director

DLT Labs will be showing off their DL Digital Wallet, a sophisticated peer-to-peer network powered by Hyperledger Fabric, offering security, efficiency, and convenience for an overall improved customer experience. DL Digital Wallet facilitates seamless account overview, accommodates company loyalty programs and management, and is integrated with leading e-payment service providers. The cost of each transaction is fixed irrespective of value transferred and received and is significantly less costly than other charges by any payment network today.

Tuesday, May 15

10:20am: ScanTrust – “Cambio” Your Coffee: Using Blockchain to Drive Ethically Sourced Coffee by Tobias Kars, VP of Product & Delivery and Nathan J. Anderson, CEO/Co-founder

As tech-savvy and socially conscious consumers seek more information about the sustainability of the products they consume, businesses need to adapt and find ways to track their relationships with suppliers and communicate this to their customer base. This demo highlights how ScanTrust and Cambio Coffee, a leading Asian direct trade specialty coffee company, leverage Hyperledger Sawtooth to deliver greater supply chain transparency within the coffee industry and bring to light trusted product information.

12:30pm: Soramitsu – Hyperledger Iroha by Makoto Takemiya, Co-CEO

Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 is close to being released and has many new features and architectural differences from previous versions. In particular, a new consensus algorithm, YAC, has been developed that allows for full Byzantine fault tolerance. Predefined commands to perform common tasks, such as creating and transferring assets, allow programmers to quickly build applications on top of Hyperledger Iroha. Come by to see what’s new with Hyperledger Iroha!

1:00pm: Evernym – Verifiable Credentials with Hyperledger Indy and the Sovrin DLT by Drummond Reed, Chief Trust Officer and Judd Bagley, Sr. Communications Director

Evernym will share a live demonstration of the use of Verifiable Credentials on the Sovrin DLT, powered by Hyperledger Indy. The demo will include a brief overview of key concepts, then show actual business cases for how a self-sovereign identity owner can be issued verifiable digital identity credentials into a mobile digital wallet and then present them to relying parties who can verify them by checking public keys on the Sovrin ledger. The result is much simpler, faster, more secure, and more privacy-respecting digital identity as well as powerful new types of decentralized online relationships. Evernym personnel will be in attendance for Q&A during and after the demonstration.

2:10pm: Oracle – Hyperledger Fabric in Enterprise-Grade Cloud by Deepak Goel, Sr Director, Software Development

Oracle’s blockchain cloud service, built on Hyperledger Fabric, provides a hardened enterprise-grade platform for building blockchain applications and enabling existing enterprise applications to use distributed ledgers and trusted transactions. In this demo, they will show how it enables rapid experimentation and provides a production-ready blockchain infrastructure to realize successful use cases in production environment with high availability, enterprise security, dynamic scalability, and ease of operations built into the platform. They will walk you through the tools in the operations console and demonstrate how Hyperledger Fabric configuration, operations, and monitoring has been simplified and how developers and IT operations can be more productive leveraging Oracle’s blockchain cloud service as their Hyperledger Fabric platform.

3:50pm: Greenstream Technology – Blockchain Meets Cannabis: Emerging Tech for an Emerging Industry by Manu Varghese, Chief Product Officer and Jim Anastassiou, VP Engineering

Greenstream Network is an industry-wide gateway solution that will allow Licensed Producers, Retailers, Regulators and other industry stakeholders to communicate, interoperate and transfer assets and value through the Canadian cannabis ecosystem. The emerging Cannabis ecosystem faces a plethora of challenges like Trace and Track of the goods through the supply chain, auditing and compliance issues, process integrity, slower payments and challenges with respect to identity validation. Greenstream provides three key solutions: Supply Chain Integrity, Payments and Settlements Engine and Self Sovereign Identity. The Greenstream ecosystem is based on a permissioned DLT model and uses Hyperledger frameworks such as Hyperledger Fabric, Burrow and Indy to achieve specific objectives. This talk outlines the options considered and the factors evaluated; challenges faced and the learnings learned etc.

Wednesday, May 16

12:15pm: B9lab – Someone needs to build it: closing the Hyperledger talent gap by Elias Haase, Founder

Every day, B9lab gets requests for Hyperledger Fabric developers, from concept-phase startups to major enterprises. However, as these requests grow, so does the need for thorough vetting and certification in the Hyperledger talent market. How do you know if the developers you are hiring are as good as they say they are? Come see this presentation to find out!

12:45pm: REMME – REMME WebAuth – passwordless authentication powered by blockchain by Alex Momot, CEO

REMME WebAuth is a first and one of the basic DApps in the REMME ecosystem. This demo will demonstrate how users (employees or clients) could log in into the browser service via REMME in one click. REMME is an access management solution that obsoletes passwords. For each device users generate certificates. Once it is installed on a device it enables one-click authentication on the service that has REMME integrated with. REMME WebAuth could be integrated with any service, from crypto exchange to big enterprises’ intranets or web services.

1:45: Altoros – Decentralization of P2P Securities Transfer Implemented on Hyperledger Fabric by Greg Skerry, Blockchain Solution Architect, Trainer

This presentation will cover details of a working blockchain project implemented for a National Settlements Depository Institution: decentralized platform for peer-to-peer securities transfer and keeping the records of securities owned by each holder. The solution developed on the Hyperledger Fabric framework keeps an immutable, auditable chain of records reflecting securities ownership transfers. This presentation will focus on the product functionality: how the platform works; how it can be adapted for transferring different types of assets or rights, incl. intangible assets.

In addition to these demos and presentations, several Hyperledger members including MedicalChain, Embleema and Change Healthcare will participate in the “State of Blockchain in Healthcare” panel at Consensus 3:10pm on May 15.

You can also join Hyperledger on the last evening of Consensus from 6-8pm at the Meetup: “The Hyperledger Greenhouse: Meet Developers Building Blockchain Frameworks” to get a chance to network and hear directly from developers of several Hyperledger frameworks! Tracy Kuhrt, Community Architect at Hyperledger, will provide an overview of the frameworks and tools that you can leverage for your enterprise blockchain solution. Then breakout sessions will give you the opportunity to have a deeper discussion to learn more about Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth (Seth), Indy and more. Please bring your burning questions about how to get started and participate in the Hyperledger community.

Be sure to follow Hyperledger on Twitter for the latest updates at Consensus. We look forward to an exciting week and seeing everyone there!

 

May 04
1

(5.4.18) GCN: Bringing blockchain as a service to government

By | Hyperledger Fabric, News

With the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program recently reaching 100 authorizations of cloud service offerings, cloud services are increasingly central to IT operations at most government agencies. And while interest in blockchain technology isn’t expected to produce large returns for government until 2025, according to Gartner, work is already underway to add blockchain-as-a-service capabilities into the cloud marketplace.

More here.

Apr 24
0

[VIDEO] Hyperledger Interviews Anton Govor, Managing Director of Strategy, Moscow Exchange

By | Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

We had the chance to connect with Anton Govor, Managing Director of Strategy at Moscow Exchange Group, to learn more about his vision for blockchain technologies and why they joined Hyperledger as a general member.

Moscow Exchange operates trading markets in equities, bonds, derivatives, the foreign exchange market, money markets and precious metals. It also operates Russia’s Central Securities Depository (National Settlement Depository) and the clearing service provider (National Clearing Centre).

Moscow Exchange realized that blockchain enabled technologies will be one of the largest opportunities and threats for the financial services industry. Their key motivation to joining Hyperledger stemmed from their understanding that blockchain is a global business, and to successfully build up these technologies, they need to be closely connected to an international community. In determining Hyperledger versus the other alternatives, they ultimately chose Hyperledger because Moscow Exchange Group believes open source platforms will win in the end over closed proprietary software.

Building on Hyperledger Fabric, Moscow Exchange has developed pilots for e-voting and commercial papers, as well as a confidentiality add-on for the financial services industry. Check out Moscow Exchange in the Hyperledger Vendor Directory.

Please enjoy and share Anton’s full interview below!

Apr 20
5

(4.20.18) CoinDesk: AWS Is Making It Easier to Use Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum

By | Hyperledger Fabric, News

Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing arm, has unveiled a new service for launching out-of-the-box blockchain networks for the ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric protocols.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote that the newly available “templates” allow clients to “launch an ethereum (either public or private) or Hyperledger Fabric (private) network in a matter of minutes and with just a few clicks.”

More here.

Apr 19
1

Lessons Learned from Hyperledger Fabric PoC Projects

By | Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Guest post: Hanna Zubko, CEO IntellectEU Inc and Thomas Bohner, Product Manager IntellectEU NV

Recently, Hyperledger provided members the opportunity to speak with global analyst firm Gartner about experiences with Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and pilots using technologies from the greenhouse of Hyperledger projects. Given IntellectEU’s announcement today about the release of Catalyst, the first platform to integrate traditional infrastructures with multiple blockchain networks including networks built with Hyperledger Fabric, we decided to share the recent PoC using Hyperledger Fabric and Catalyst we discussed with Gartner.

Implementation of Blockchain technology allows not only to reduce costs and facilitate efficiencies within enterprise ecosystems but also create entirely new revenue streams. The PoC was for a car insurance company. The objective was to use Hyperledger Fabric and Catalyst to create a flexible pay per mile insurance product based on the actual car mileage and condition of the vehicle. Catalyst served as the hub for connecting the insurance database, the car dongle (IoT device), end-user mobile application and Hyperledger Fabric itself. Catalyst listened to the changes on all the data sources and based on the business rules, applied the corresponding logic. IntellectEU deployed two smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric; one to calculate the premium based on the actual car mileage and a second to confirm the payment. Catalyst has an architecture that is open, modern, and flexible and will be able to add multiple new players to the ecosystem in the future.

As part of the interview, Gartner asked about our preferred methodology for architecting blockchain PoC projects. We broke it down to the following steps:

  1. Begin with a 2-day design thinking session, shaping and grooming the use case, and evaluating if blockchain technology brings significant added value to the use case.
  2. From those discussions, split up the business requirements into multiple use cases.
  3. Shape up the use cases to fit in the “fail fast” methodology.
  4. Create a solution roadmap.
  5. At this stage, select the initial use case to use as a base for the PoC.
  6. Create the Overall Design Document and the Functional Requirements Specification in cooperation with a customer.
  7. Develop the PoC using Agile approach. For more information, visit http://agilemanifesto.org.
  8. Deliver the solution to the customer
  9. Roll out the solution to multiple additional ecosystem participants

From this car insurance related PoC, there were two primary lessons learned that are worth sharing.

First, it is important to determine at the outset whether using distributed ledger technology would give any boost to the use case. We have found that walking customers through the following “Blockchain Decision Path” is very helpful.

Second, it was very important to have a specialist who understood General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements to ensure compliance. In brief, GDPR is a regulation that requires businesses to protect the personal data and privacy of EU citizens for transactions that occur within EU member states. It provides for a harmonization of the data protection regulations throughout the EU, thereby making it easier for non-European companies to comply with these regulations; however, this comes at the cost of a strict data protection compliance regime with severe penalties of up to 4% of worldwide turnover or €20 million, whichever is higher. GDPR will become enforceable from May 25th 2018. According to an Ovum report, two-thirds of businesses expect to have to change in their global business strategies to accommodate new data privacy regulations and more than half of businesses think they will be fined due to GDPR in Europe.

A valuable benefit of being a part of the Hyperledger community is the opportunity to hear from members about their experiences “in the field” using Hyperledger technologies for PoCs, pilots and production deployments. We believe sharing best practices with the community helps the collective efforts to increase widespread adoption of Hyperledger distributed ledger frameworks.

Apr 18
0

(4.18.18) CoinDesk: Huawei Unveils Hyperledger-Powered Blockchain Service Platform

By | Hyperledger Fabric, News

Telecommunications and smartphone provider Huawei has become the latest tech giant in China to launch a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform.

Announced at Huawei’s analyst conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday, the company’s new platform, dubbed Blockchain Service, is said to enable companies to develop smart contracts on top of a distributed ledger network for several use-case scenarios.

More here.

Apr 17
2

Hyperledger Bug Bounty Program Now Open

By | Blog, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Dave Huseby, Hyperledger Security Maven

When I started as the Hyperledger Security Maven just over a year ago, I set out to make sure that Hyperledger’s community of contributors were doing everything possible to make good on the promise of better software and better security from the open source process. As of right now, we have in place a public bug tracker, continuous integration builds, core infrastructure initiative compliance, and a full responsible disclosure security bug policy and process. Today, I am happy to announce the next piece of our security process: the Hyperledger Bug Bounty.  

For the last six months we have been running a private bug bounty with HackerOne. Today we are opening up the Hyperledger Bug Bounty for public participation. Currently only Hyperledger Fabric is in the scope of the bounty program but we hope to add Hyperledger Sawtooth and other Hyperledger projects soon. HackerOne will continue to administer the bug bounty for us with close cooperation between their team and our community. We chose HackerOne because we think it is the best use of our resources and they share a similar commit to open source software as Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation.

At Hyperledger we have a broad base of committed developers and it is their professionalism that makes our security process solid and straightforward. When I first started, we already had in place our public bug tracking system and most teams had set up continuous integration build systems for monitoring build health. In the last year we formalized the process by which projects can move from development status to their first 1.0 release, including a number of security requirements.

The first security requirement is to meet the requirements of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII). The Core Infrastructure Initiative is a set of best practices for open source software security. Earning the CII badge requires open source projects to set up services and processes and key positions that all serve the goal of producing more secure and trustworthy software. At the time of this writing, Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, Iroha, and Composer have all earned their CII badge.

The second security requirement is to nominate one to three members of a project’s community to participate on the Hyperledger security team. The Hyperledger security team manages and executes our policy of responsible disclosure of security bugs. Security bugs are confidentially reported to Hyperledger through security@hyperledger.org or by filing a security bug in our JIRA. It is the job of the volunteer security team to triage, respond to, fix, and disclose the security bugs that are reported. As of right now, the security team consists of 16 members from five of our project communities.

The third security requirement is for a project to undergo a security audit from an outside auditor to establish a baseline for the codebase. We hired the auditing firm Nettitude to do security audits of Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, Iroha and Composer.  So far Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth and Iroha have been completed and are in various stages of resolution and publication. Currently only the Hyperledger Fabric security audit report has been fully resolved and published. The rest will be published soon.

Looking ahead into the future, I plan on getting more involved with the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) to see if we can use Hyperledger blockchain platforms to better track the provenance of open source software, including our own. I hope to one day use verifiable claims to automatically check for vulnerabilities in dependencies from our continuous integration build system. If open source software packages were to issue a verifiable claim stating that a specific version of their software has no known security vulnerabilities, then when one is reported, the claim can be revoked. The revocation of the claim could then function as an automatic signal to all users of that software that they need to update. Continuous integration systems could check the claims of all dependencies and stop the build if one or more are found to have vulnerabilities.  This represents the next generation of reproducible builds and would leverage blockchains for provenance tracking of software from construction all the way through deprecation.

Security is always an ongoing process of improvement. Thanks to the commitment and professionalism and general good cheer of the Hyperledger community, we have made great strides in the last year. Now with our public bug bounty, we hope to further make good on the open source promise and to deserve the trust our users have in us.

We encourage developers to join our efforts on the bug bounty program and also start contributing to Hyperledger projects. You can plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.