Category

Hyperledger Fabric

Oct 10
0

Hyperledger Launches First Free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on edX.org

By | Announcements, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Pre-registration now open for Blockchain for Business: An Introduction to Hyperledger free online course

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (October 10, 2017) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, announced today the availability of its first free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) — Blockchain for Business: An Introduction to Hyperledger. The free, self-paced online course is offered through edX.org, the nonprofit online learning platform founded in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The course provides an introduction to Hyperledger and its key business blockchain frameworks. Pre-registration is now open with the course becoming fully available on October 25 with the option to add a verified certificate of completion for $99. Verified Certificates are a valuable addition to academic or professional portfolios and can be added to resumes/CVs and LinkedIn profiles.

“Interest in blockchain technology is exploding; Software developers, product teams, and business managers are all desperately eager to figure out how this technology can solve real-world problems,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger.  “This first introductory-level course is carefully designed for both nontechnical and technical audiences, to bring everyone further up the learning curve and get started with it on their own business needs.”

The MOOC is delivered in partnership with edX and the Linux Foundation, responsible for training and certifying more developers on open source software than any organization in the world. It covers key features of blockchain technologies and the differentiators between various types of Hyperledger projects.

The course will provide an understanding of:

  • Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies
  • Current Hyperledger projects and common use cases
  • How to do clean installations of Hyperledger Fabric, and Hyperledger Sawtooth frameworks
  • How to build simple applications on top of Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth frameworks
  • How to become involved in and contribute to Hyperledger

“Hyperledger and blockchain are two key skillsets that are increasingly in demand in today’s digital world,” said edX CEO and MIT Professor, Anant Agarwal. “Our global community of learners have told us that they are seeking courses to help them gain the career-relevant skills they need for the modern workplace. We are thrilled to once again partner with the Linux Foundation to offer a course on this popular, in-demand subject that will provide the building blocks needed for success within the exciting and rapidly expanding field of blockchain technologies.”

To find out more, or to pre-register now, go to: https://www.edx.org/course/blockchain-business-introduction-linuxfoundationx-lfs171x

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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 27
0

技术盛会多烧脑？Hyperledger北京Meetup落幕全球创新社区

By | Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Guest post: ChainNova

4小时，10位分享嘉宾，80位区块链爱好者。8月19日，坐标中关村创业大街全球创新社区，Hyperledger开源社区第一次北京Meetup圆满落幕。此次活动由智链ChainNova研究院联手Linux Foundation、IBM共同主办，是Hyperledger Fabric商用正式版1.0发布后第一次聚会。会上，Hyperledger亚太区副总裁Julian Gordan亮相京城，分享Hyperledger 在全球的发展概况。智链ChainNova、万达网络科技集团、招商银行、金丘科技就区块链的平台建设、应用开发，以及在农业、金融、商业等领域的应用和前景做了主题分享。此外，智链ChainNova还代表中国工作组向社区报告了Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 的技术更新，IBM则从生态的角度分享了围绕区块链开展的技术推广计划和后续活动。

Hyperledger全球副总裁Julian Gordan

TWGC联席主席杨保华

全球跨行业协作，中国技术工作组成绩斐然

据Hyperledger亚太区副总裁Julian Gordan介绍，Hyperledger的全球协作跨金融、银行、物联网、供应链、制造和科技多个行业，主要目标是让开源团队为商业供应链技术系统创造多样的方式，如创建企业级的、开源、分布式账本的框架和代码，提供中立、开放和社区驱动的基础架构，创建技术社区等。

其中，中国技术工作组（简称TWGC）在成立不到一年的时间里成绩斐然。据TWGC联席主席杨保华分享，该工作组的使命之一就是通过建立技术社区，推动Hyperledger在中国的发展和应用落地。为此，成立了包括IBM、万达、智链ChainNova、华为在内的专家组，来领导Hyperledger各个项目的发展，并鼓励创新，积累了很多可用于产业实践的技术干货，同时工作组各成员之间相互合作，策划出一系列技术推广活动如黑客松、沙龙、研讨会等，反响热烈。

智链ChainNova技术总监张增骏

Fabric 0.6 VS 1.0，进步巨大却任重道远

来自智链ChainNova的技术总监张增骏在此次活动上可是吸足了粉。短短半个小时的分享，将Hyperledger Fabric 0.6和最新上线的1.0版本做了详细解剖和对比。从架构设计、共识机制、状态数据库、账本存储、Fabric-CA、多链、动态增删节点、智能合约升级、性能测试、部署方式、支持接口、提供工具12个维度解析了两个版本的差异，展现了升级后的1.0版本在商业应用中的优势。尽管如此，未来仍然有很多难关需要攻克。如改进拜占庭容错协议，增加SQL的状态数据库查询，提供完善Go和Python的SDK等。

智链ChainNova CEO 董宁

闭环商业模式让商品真正“有源可溯”

智链ChainNovaCEO董宁以北大荒“区块链大农场”为例，分享了闭环商业模式对溯源场景的必要性。分享从影响放心粮的三大问题入手，解释了我们为什么在普通渠道和市场里很难买到真正的高品质北大荒大米。而智链针对这一痛点，设计出放心粮生态作业模式和核心节点，以区块链技术为基础，结合物联网和人工智能，将线下的农业种植工人、手持终端设备、IOT设备、卫星遥感、农业机械改造、流通加工链条等环节的数据全部上链，形成线上线下溯源相结合的闭环商业模式，真正做到从源头到终端安全、透明、真实的商品溯源。

万达网络科技集团创新中心副总经理季宙栋（持话筒者）

招商银行区块链负责人李浩国

IBM大中华区业务拓展经理王燕青

此外，万达网络科技集团创新中心副总经理季宙栋分享了区块链技术如何驱动数字化商业的发展。在一切都是注意力经济的时代，商业模式的创新需要注入科技力量。在如商铺直租这样的场景中，针对虚假交易信息、中介模式增加交易成本等痛点，区块链的核心技术如智能合约、分级CA管理等可以很好地解决这一问题。金丘科技联合创始人韩根则向我们展示了基于区块链技术的监管服务平台如何解决行业痛点，以及建设监管服务平台的意义和规划。来自招商银行的区块链专家李浩国从区块链应用开发和平台建设两方面向我们介绍了如何为应用提供更加敏捷的fabric 开发环境。最后，IBM大中华区业务拓展经理王燕青从生态合作的角度出发，分享了中国社区正在积极策划的系列区块链技术推广活动，而近期即将召开的，就是九月即将开始的上海科博会双创周及北京大学金融科技研究中心系列研讨会。

此次活动除演讲嘉宾外，所有参与者全是公开招募，会场几近爆满。会上社区成员发言活跃，嘉宾和其他参会者互动积极，场面火爆。Hyperledger亚太区总裁Julian Gordon和智链 ChainNova CEO董宁表示，目前区块链发展势头非常好，但也正因为如此，目前社会上也出现了打着区块链旗号的各种商业乱象。为了让区块链回归技术，回归开源社区，智链将会继续定期承办Hyperledger Meetup，让社区和广大开发者未来有更多的交流。同时智链还将联合北京大学新一代信息技术研究院、各大开源社区及其他产学研相关单位，组织各项金融科技活动以推动产业的健康发展。

部分嘉宾合影：

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Sep 26
0

Hyperledger Gains 10 New Members

By | 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 14
0

Mentorship at Hyperledger: Four Interns Share Their Appreciation for Great Mentors

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

If you read about the projects that Hyperledger’s summer interns have just completed, you’ll quickly see that these are serious internships that come with the prize of greater knowledge, skills, and connections with the technical community. One of the most important of these connections is the connection to a great mentor.

As part of our efforts to foster the development of blockchain talent globally, we pair each of our interns up with an expert to mentor and guide them. Here are all the ways that the mentors involved with Hyperledger’s 2017 summer internship program made a difference, in the words of our interns.

    • “My mentor, Baohua Yang from IBM, helped me in the project to understand and contribute.” — Indirajith Vijai Ananth
    • “My mentor, Jiang Feihu from Huawei Technologies, is one of the most supportive mentors I’ve come across to work with. Right from my selection for the internship, he started mentoring me and strategizing everything, although it was still a month difference from the official beginning of the internship. He’s a good mentor who helped me at every single difficulty that struck my way.” — Nikhil Chawla
    • “My mentor was Makoto Takemiya from Soramitsu, and his mentorship helped me understand how Hyperledger Iroha and similar projects worked. We had meetings every week where progress on projects would be presented and where I would ask questions regarding details on Hyperledger Iroha and what the best way of achieving certain tasks would be. Makoto is a very skilled developer and he guided my research and development process to make sure everything was on track.” — Ezequiel Gomez
    • “My mentor was László Gönczy from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and Quanopt Ltd. His profound knowledge in business process modeling was a continuous source of guidance and support for my work. Firstly, he helped me to select of the BPMN elements to be implemented in the experimental prototype. The BPMN has an extremely large variety of notions in its metamodel (the standard being hundreds of pages long), but the important elements commonly used in the industry form only a smaller subset. Secondly, he helped to refine my approach by providing common, yet complex use cases/sample models. The expert guidance of my mentor played a significant part in successfully completing the project. Our work enjoyed a huge benefit of the professional advices of Imre Kocsis (BME).” — Attila Klenik

Thank you to all of Hyperledger’s mentors for fostering new blockchain talent and ensuring a successful 2017 summer internship program!

Sep 12
0

Meet the TSC: Arnaud Le Hors, IBM

By | 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
0

ABCs of Open Governance

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

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:

  1. Identification of eligible participants
  2. Nominations
  3. 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 .

Aug 15
0

Blockchain-based digital identity: How Hyperledger is helping to turn hype into reality

By | Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Guest post: Andre Boysen, Chief Identity Officer, SecureKey Technologies

Identity has never been easy, but it’s particularly tricky in the digital age. For too long we’ve been forced to use outdated processes to prove who we are when we’re trying to get things done. It shouldn’t take a half-day off work and a trip to a government office to renew a passport, or an entire evening to update a smartphone plan, yet we’re being forced to do so because companies need controls to prove we are who we say we are and the gold standard for doing this today is a counter visit.

Thanks to blockchain, that’s changing. Distributed ledger technology is giving us the opportunity to do what we haven’t been able to do so far – prove with greater certainty that you are you, to immediately access the services you want online, in person or on the phone. Utilizing this approach, we can develop a digital identity and attribute sharing network designed to allow consumers to use digital credentials they already have with organizations they already trust (like their banks), and verify their identity quickly to access services from trusted institutions (like telcos, government services, even sharing economy companies) instantly and with certainty. No more need to create another username and password combination that will be easily forgotten, or dedicate hours on end to perform a simple task, like updating a driver’s license, setting up a new phone or checking your credit score.

SecureKey changed consumer single-sign-on for the better when we introduced the concept of triple-blind authentication with SecureKey Concierge. The simple idea was that using a single credential could actually increase privacy, because none of the transaction participants got a complete picture of the user’s transaction. The bank does not see your online destination, the government does not see which bank you used or your account details and SecureKey does not know who you are. The challenge for us when we moved beyond accessing services to registering for new ones was how to implement the triple-blind model for identity information.

While it was technically possible to do this with public key infrastructure (PKI), there were some difficulties. For example, if the receiver had to check the signature on the data for verification, the blinding broke. A possible solution to this was the introduction of a key exchange that effectively blinded the receiver. However, this created a fourth factor in the transaction system, which increased complexity and made it much harder to trace a transaction in the event of a compromised account.

Enter blockchain. The advent of this technology adds some key capabilities and allows us to solve our service registration challenges.  Among its many benefits, blockchain  allows us to implement triple-blind attributes, data signing for service integrity and resiliency to mitigate against a single point of failure.

The benefit goes beyond the individual citizen to the businesses they choose to use. In an age where everything is hackable and millions of customer records are stolen or dumped online every month, organizations are realizing that one of their most toxic assets can often be customer records. Organizations that can confidently verify the identity of their customers quickly without the need to store that customer’s data on their own networks experience a twofold benefit: not only is there a real world cost savings for their IT infrastructure, but there is also a massively reduced risk of being financially accountable in the event that bad actors attempt to steal their customer data, namely because the data never needs to reside on their servers in the first place. This greatly reduces the risk of customer data becoming toxic and negatively impacting a company following a breach or leak – something we’re seeing become much more frequent each and every month.  

We’re still in the early days of blockchain, but through communities like Hyperledger Fabric, hosted by The Linux Foundation, we’re seeing how its applicability can be endless. From currency to identity and further afield, blockchain is moving quickly beyond the buzzword stage and becoming critical to the evolution of services in the digital age.  There is a lot of blockchain hype to be sure, but for identity blockchain is going to be really helpful.

Aug 08
0

Developer Showcase Series: Aram Barnett, Vergo

By | Blog, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Fabric

Our Developer Showcase blog series serves to highlight the work and motivations of developers, users and researchers collaborating on Hyperledger’s incubated projects. Next up is Aram Barnett, Blockchain Engineer and Managing Partner at Vergo.

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

First, identify why you need blockchain. With all the hype surrounding the technology, it’s easy to think you can capitalize on the hype by sprinkling some blockchain into your app. Without a well-defined plan on how and why you are going to apply it, you are simply wasting your time and money.

Second, I want anyone interested in the technology to commit to learning about the details surrounding the progress blockchain has made rather than just the media hype that surrounds it. According to Gartner Hype Cycle, blockchain is at the peak of the technology hype cycle, and soon blockchain will be transitioning into the “trough of disillusion” where people outside of the development community will think that all of the promises of blockchain are not possible. However, unlike many new technologies on the hype cycle, blockchain will quickly escape the trough of disillusionment and grow exponentially when businesses realize the value of private ledgers. It’s is not easy but with enough dedication and a thorough understanding of the fundamentals, a developer can contribute to the blockchain community and create world changing applications. Third, get familiar Go and Javascript.

Hyperledger Composer, the tool that we use to rapidly build and test business networks, uses Javascript to enable the creation of business actions. Once you dive in the technology, be mindful of the difference between permissioned versus non-permissioned ledgers (a.k.a. public versus private blockchains, respectively) and what they offer. We will soon be releasing our own teaching resources for developers get up to speed on Hyperledger and the best practices on developing blockchain based business networks.

Aram Barnett, Blockchain Engineer and Managing Partner, Vergo

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 first heard about blockchain when I purchased my first bitcoin in 2011. I was so infatuated with bitcoin I dedicated 3 years of my life to running an alternative asset management fund that exclusively traded cryptocurrencies, learning everything I could about bitcoin and blockchain. I always knew that the real value of bitcoin came from the blockchain and in 2015 I began focusing all of my efforts on developing smart contracts on ethereum and coming up with business use cases.

I am currently working on Vergo, a company I co-founded to create blockchain-based business networks for open source and enterprise use.We’re working to make existing corporations more efficient by cutting excess expense associated with business transactions. To further support this community, we are open-sourcing some of our business logic to help other developers learn about this unique technology. We believe that this technology will allow developers to create turnkey businesses in which open-source business logic is easily deployable. This will increase access to entrepreneurship around the globe and empower people to start their own businesses.

More importantly, we believe we have the ethical responsibility to help transition the world to this new era in a responsible manner in which participants understand the consequences of enhanced business network efficiency and automation. We strive to ride the new wave of technological innovation by giving equal attention to corporate efficiency and social well-being.

If you look at  the Gartner Hype Cycle, mentioned earlier, blockchain is at the peak of public hype about its potential. This new wave of technology is scary to some and at peak hype it can seem like anything is possible. I made the choice to ride the blockchain wave. Since I first got involved with bitcoin and subsequently blockchain in 2011, I knew that it would be a promising technology that needs to be developed and implemented globally. We are currently at peak hype, so public interest will decline in the next few years. However, the underlying technology will still be revolutionary and over time the corporate sector will realize how truly valuable it is to their networks.

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?

The most interesting project to come out of is Hyperledger Fabric. We are excited about the progress of Fabric 1.0 and what it has to offer to large and medium enterprises. I met with the lead developers at the Hyperledger hackfest in Washington DC to learn more about Fabric and help contribute to the project. Vergo is very interested in this because we see the long-term impact that Fabric will have on how companies deploy blockchain solutions. We are very excited to be building applications and business logic on top of the Fabric ledger that these talented developers have built. We are currently discussing the possibility of cooperation between Vergo and some IBMers to display our business applications running on the IBM z mainframe. Another exciting application called Hyperledger Composer, the application we use to model, build, and test our business networks very quickly using their  business development language. After speaking with  Simon Stone, one of the maintainers of Hyperledger Composer, we are very excited for the future of Composer as a development tool and the services they plan to integrate into it.

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

Blockchain has the ability to solve a lot of problems. The ability to capture the nature of “businesses” and their “workers” and digitizing those relationships could lead to efficiency increases across almost every industry.

I think what I am most interested in, in regards to public-facing blockchain solutions, is the possibility of interoperability between chains and the assignment of an identity to every person. For instance, imagine from the very day you are born you were assigned a bank account, a verified identity and trackable health records all stored on a government ledger. From here, your financials, health records, and identity would be immutable and secure and would follow you over the course of your life. The interoperability between your identity and your financial records, for example, would verify you exist while not disclosing your personal data every time you make a transaction. By solving the problem of identity, many other possible solutions arise.

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

Let me answer your question with another question: Where do I not see it?

Blockchain-based business networks are inevitable. I think there will be varied solutions for individual businesses and sectors that provide accessible solutions to problems associated with the analysis of big data and efficiency of transactions. Blockchain will be easier to collect and analyze data, which will enhance our understanding of business practices and markets.

Additionally, I hope that turnkey businesses will emerge across the world using open source logic developed out of the Hyperledger framework. The ability to replicate businesses with extreme ease will increase access to opportunities for economically disadvantaged peoples. I hope that the pool of open source logic is such that it allows anyone with enough emotional intelligence and work-ethic to provide a valuable product to a customer even without understanding underlying business logic.

Jul 31
0

[VIDEO] Hyperledger Interviews Ram Komarraju, CLS Bank

By | Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

We spoke with Ram Komarraju, Chief Architect at CLS Bank. CLS Bank is a founding member of Hyperledger. Having an open source initiative that is industry wide like Hyperledger is vital to the adoption and success of distributed ledger technology (DLT), according to Ram.

CLS Bank’s major focus is to work with the Hyperledger community to make sure the design of Hyperledger Fabric meets the requirements and needs of the enterprise including resiliency, security and scale. Ram believes a key value of being a part of Hyperledger is building an open source DLT solution that is accepted across industries for a wide variety of use cases including financial services and others.

Watch the full interview:

Jul 31
0

(7.31.17) CoinDesk: Japan’s Fujitsu to ‘Commercialize’ Hyperledger Fabric Software by Next Year

By | Hyperledger Fabric, News

The research arm of Japanese IT firm Fujitsu has unveiled new technology it developed for the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain project as part of a plan to commercialize the software by next spring.

Billed as a means to speed up the rate of transactions for high-performance uses, Fujitsu Laboratories said today that it has developed and tested new tools to speed up transactions with Fabric. The first production-read version of Fabric was launched by the Linux Foundation earlier this month, coming weeks after the publication of a release candidate.

More here.