Category

Hyperledger Fabric

Oct 16
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Electric Vehicle Roaming Using Hyperledger Fabric and Dash Special Transactions

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

The University of Wyoming (Laramie) hosted the 2nd Wyoming Blockchain Stampede event during 20-22nd September 2019. The event comprised three tracks: hackathon, blockchain conference and the Sandcastle Startups Challenge. Together, Chainrider and the Blockchain Research Lab @ Arizona State University participated in these events and accomplished remarkable results. We have won two hackathon prizes (a 1st and 2nd place) for BRL@ASU team for designing a roaming framework on private and public blockchains inside the electric vehicles charging ecosystem. Chainrider has won the 3rd place in the Sandcastle startups challenge. 

The Energy Landscape

Blockchain technology enables peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions through the elimination of a centralized entity governing consensus.  Rather than having a centralized database, the data is distributed across multiple nodes – this both enables crash fault tolerance and makes the system tamper-proof, due to a distributed consensus algorithm.

Blockchain technology has been listed as one of the key innovations in the report, Innovation for a Renewable-Powered Future. Within the energy sector there is an opportunity to handle user accounts and payments using blockchains. Currently, utility companies follow a centralized approach to handle accounts and payments. Thus, the system’s availability and reliability are jeopardized due to a single point of failure. Blockchains, due to their inherent nature, have the potential to provide a promising solution to control and manage trading energy surplus or flexible demand on a P2P basis.

Recent solutions that have used blockchain technology have focused on achieving a shift from a highly centralised power system to smaller scale, localised systems that optimise power demand, consumption, and management. These microgrids are emerging as notions towards decentralization inside the energy ecosystem. They bring together a combination of clean technologies such as distributed generation, batteries, and renewable resources to help organisations operate autonomously  – apart from the traditional electrical grid. Power Ledger and Brooklyn Microgrid are examples of two  such solutions that focus on applying blockchain technology to a microgrid use case. 

The Idea

At the Blockchain Research Lab at ASU, we have an in-house solution to enable a P2P Energy Marketplace using Hyperledger Fabric. It focuses on the transactive energy concept that assigns value to facilitate dynamic balancing between independent power producers. It defines actors who produce, as well as consume energy, as prosumers. Prosumers are offered a way to closely match and balance energy supply and demand. Using smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric, we digitally facilitate, verify and enforce the negotiations taking place on a transactive grid. Benefits for such a system, for various participants, are summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Energy trading blockchain ecosystem benefits

Our solution identifies four actors that participate in the blockchain ecosystem.

  • Utility Company
  • Photo-Voltaic Installation Owners
  • Storage Installation Owners
  • Utility Customers

Four channels are  used for facilitating transactions on the energy marketplace between these actors. Utility company acts as the operator since it owns the physical infrastructure.  The blockchain infrastructure is displayed in Figure 2. 

Figure 2 – Hyperledger Fabric architecture for  energy trading blockchain ecosystem

The solution implemented uses a permissioned (private) blockchain microgrid – it is a closed ecosystem with each participant well defined. One drawback of such ecosystems landscape is that the asset associated with one such ecosystem has no value as well as meaning beyond that ecosystem. To remedy this drawback, we have worked on an energy trading and roaming use case, showcasing it within the electric vehicle (EV) charging ecosystem. This challenge was sponsored by Dash and Chainrider as part of the WyoHackathon challenges. 

Figure 3 – EV charging ecosystem potential actors

Take a look at the scenario illustrated in Figure 3. A user in the system owns a PV installation as well as an EV. The user has an agreement with an energy storage owner to store surplus of generated energy. The main problem is to share the energy as a digital asset outside its ecosystem so that the user can charge the EV in other similar ecosystems (e.g., while traveling). 

Our solution has two major tracks:

  1. Within a local EV charging ecosystem, leverage Hyperledger Fabric to mediate agreements between EV owner, storage operator and EV charging stations operator, as well as generate and transfer ownership of tokenized energy assets. A local EV charging ecosystem has a platform operator (e.g., utility company). 
  2. Outside the local EV charging ecosystem, leverage Dash public blockchain to store and share proof of ownership over the tokenized energy assets (platform operators agree that information on a robust public blockchain such as Dash is a sufficient proof of ownership). In this manner we:  
    • Leverage OP_RETURN Transaction from Dash to share ‘proof of ownership’ for stored energy.
    • Allow an asset stored on a consortium ecosystem to be exchanged outside using Dash transaction features.
    • Achieve interoperability on the application level between a permissioned and public blockchain.

Figure 4 – Private-to-public blockchain interoperability for EV charging roaming

Figure 4 summarizes the interoperability between private and public blockchains to achieve the roaming use case. A demo for a prototype of this application can be seen by visiting this link. 

The Outcome

A prototype for the idea was implemented and presented by Raj Sadaye and Arsh Padda from the Blockchain Research Lab @ ASU. The BRL team won 1st place in the Dash/Chainrider Blockchain Challenge, and the 2nd place in the WyoHackathon Interoperability Challenge.

Dragan Boscovic and Sasa Pesic from the Chainrider team competed against blockchain startups from all over the USA in the Sandcastle Startups Challenge. The main driving point of the Chainrider platform is its ability to transform a team of IT professionals into blockchain experts in a matter of hours. This is achieved by providing public and Hyperledger Fabric tools to help with blockchain exploration and transacting on one hand, and deployment of blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts on the other. After multiple rounds of judging and one-on-one team battles, the Chainrider team finished 3rd in the competition. 

Cover image by markus roider from Pixabay

Oct 14
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Spotlighting Supply Chain Use Cases

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth

It’s #HyperledgerSupplyChain month so we wanted to spotlight some of the exciting ways Hyperledger technologies are improving traceability, adding efficiencies and building trust in supply chains around the world.

The role of open source enterprise blockchain is well laid out by Target as a mechanism for “ensuring multiparty trust across enterprises doing business together” in this article about the benefits of the technology. 

To help boost the #HyperledgerSupplyChain conversation, below are some noteworthy use cases. Chime in on social with your own examples of Hyperledger powering supply chain solutions. 

Walmart’s use of Hyperledger Fabric to track food for better safety: When an outbreak of a food-borne disease happens, it can take days, if not weeks, to find its source. Better traceability could help save lives by allowing companies to act faster and protect the livelihoods of farmers by only discarding produce from the affected farms. Using a system powered by Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart can now trace the origin of over 25 products from five different suppliers. The company plans to roll out the system to more products and categories in the near future. 

ScanTrust’s use of Hyperledger Sawtooth to bring transparency to the supply chain: To help their client Cambio Coffee bring more transparency to their ethical trade business, ScanTrust used Hyperledger Sawtooth to build a blockchain-enabled traceability function to enhance its supply chain application. Cambio Coffee implemented ScanTrust’s unique QR codes on their packs in May 2018 to an enthusiastic response from customers. Currently, the roaster and the delivery company enter data onto the blockchain. Future plans call for the roll out the feature to the shipping company and, eventually the farmers, to cover the whole supply chain. Customers are also interested in using the platform other blockchain-supported initiatives, like “Tip your farmer.”

Circulor’s first-ever mine-to-manufacturer traceability of a conflict mineral with Hyperledger Fabric: The African country of Rwanda is the world’s biggest supplier of tantalum: a rare mineral used to make capacitors found in devices like smartphones and laptops. To prove beyond doubt that every bag of tantalum ore from Rwanda was mined, transported, and processed under OECD-approved conditions, without any child or slave labor, Circulor created a Hyperledger Fabric-based system to trace tantalum from three mines and an ore-sorting facility in Rwanda. The system is designed to slash the high cost for compliance, satisfy regulators, reassure consumers, and build revenues for Rwanda.

To see the full line up of supply chain use cases in the Hyperledger Blockchain Showcase, head here. If you have a Hyperledger-powered supply chain project you’d like to see on this list, please submit it.

We also have an active community for those interested in participating and contributing to supply chain solutions. The Hyperledger Supply Chain Special Interest Group (SIG) represents a global membership of logistics and supply chain professionals united in advancing the state of the supply chain industry through the implementation of enterprise-grade solutions based on Hyperledger technologies.

Sep 19
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2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: Analyzing Hyperledger Fabric Ledger and Transactions using Elasticsearch and Kibana

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program

Introduction

This summer, I had the chance to work as a full-time intern at Hyperledger. I am writing this post to share my experiences about working with Hyperledger and to report on the project itself and the impact it can have on the Hyperledger community as well as on my personal development.

My mentor was Salman Baset, an active member of the Hyperledger community. I must emphasize what a great mentor he was, always available, communicative and helpful. He gave me a lot of hints and helped me out when I got stuck, but, still, I had the freedom to make technical and strategic decisions. I have learned a lot from him, and he (and this project) provided a huge boost for my personal improvement.

The goal of the project

The main goal of the project was to create a mechanism to analyze and display ledger data from both operational and data-oriented aspects (e.g., allow selection of a particular key and visualization of updates to it).

What I accomplished

The main components of the project:

  • An Elastic Beats agent (fabricbeat) written in Go that connects to peer(s), queries it, and ships its data to Elasticsearch and Kibana (core contribution of this project).
  • Three  different Fabric networks with chaincodes written in Go and Node.js (for testing).
  • Applications for user enrollment and transaction submission using the node SDK (for generating test data).
  • Elasticsearch cluster and Kibana server. (Docker Compose file is borrowed from an open source project.)
  • Generic Kibana dashboards similar to Hyperledger Explorer, plus data-centric dashboards (contribution of this project).

1. Architecture and basic data flow (the highlighted parts are the main contributions of this project)

The most exciting part of the project was learning a number of new technologies. I used Golang, Node.js, Elastic Beats, Elasticsearch, Kibana and, of course, Hyperledger Fabric. Designing the Beats agent and implementing the generic Kibana dashboards were  great professional challenges, too, and it was an extraordinary experience to see them working.

I also created demo setups that can be installed and run with only one make command. They demonstrate the main features of the project.

2. Operational dashboard (multiple fabricbeat agents can be run at the same time, we can select peer and channel from which we want to see the data)

3. Searching for all the transports that departed from “Factory0”

Suggestions

Hyperledger Fabric uses an approach that wraps the data into multiple layers of meta data, and stores this whole package on the ledger. This makes analysis quite painful, since we have to do a lot of processing and unwrapping to obtain the most valuable parts of this data. Having the data indexed in a NoSQL database would make analysis much easier.

Plans for the future

This project has a lot of potential. A few ideas on how it could be improved and used in the future:

  • The project provides a more customizable way for blockchain analysis than Hyperledger Explorer, with extended functionalities and data-centric analysis possibilities.
  • Hyperledger Fabric writes ledger data to a file by default. By replacing the ledger file with
  • Elasticsearch, MongoDB, CouchDB, or other appropriate database, the need for a separate Beats agent can potentially be eliminated. Further, having ledger data directly stored in a database (instead of a file) can potentially simplify Hyperledger Fabric deployment architecture in Production (e.g., by removing a separate instance of CouchDB per peer).
  • This project could be generalized to work with every kind of blockchain implementation, not only Hyperledger Fabric.

We submitted the project to  Hyperledger Lab, so further development is open for contribution. I am really excited to be a member of and work with the open source community!

For more details, please see my complete project report here.

Sep 19
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2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: Scaling Real World Hyperledger Fabric Deployments

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program

I got selected to the 2019 Hyperledger mentorship program for the project “Scaling Real World Hyperledger Fabric Deployments.” My mentors were Sasha and Nicola from Aid:Tech. Through this internship, I contributed several new features to “Nephos,” which is an open-source tool under Hyperledger Labs. Nephos helps to deploy and manage Hyperledger Fabric networks easily.

During my internship, I worked closely with the engineering team of Aid:Tech. My mentors, and I had several meetings to plan our tasks and to finalize the architectures. I made the following contributions to Nephos during my internship:

1. Stabilizing Nephos

During the first few weeks, I spent time on familiarizing myself with the relevant technologies and Nephos itself. During this time I fixed some known bugs in Nephos. Also during this phase, I improved the logging capability of Nephos through the native Python logger.

2. Support for multiple organizations

Nephos 0.3.X supported only one orderer organization and one peer organization. We wanted to allow the users to define as many organizations as they wanted. As some major changes had to be done that needed to be compatible with the future plans we have for Nephos, we discussed the architectures and changes in GitHub. Then we finalized the architecture and started working on it after an online meeting. Now, Nephos 0.4.X let multiple organizations to be defined.

3. Support for multiple channels

I also created a PR to let the user define multiple channels and precisely define which organizations belong to which channels so that, during the deployment, Nephos creates those channels and make the peers join the relevant channels. In order to achieve this, I also had to make changes to the “hlf-peer” helm charts in helm stable repository.

4. Support for Hyperledger Fabric 1.4

As Hyperledger Fabric 1.4 is the LTS version of Fabric, we made Nephos and the relevant helm charts support Fabric 1.4.

5. Support for TLS communication within nodes.

After supporting Fabric 1.4, we wanted to make sure that Nephos will work with RAFT ordering service, which is one the main feature we got by updating to Fabric 1.4. But, in order to support RAFT, we needed to support TLS communication between peers and orderers. I implemented this support, and now users can either use the TLS certificates generated by the cryptogen or they can ask Nephos to deploy a separate certificate authority to provide TLS certificates. In the latter case, Nephos will deploy a separate CA, generate all the relevant certificates, place the certificates in relevant pods and will use them for all the communication.

I hope to present my work at Hyperledger Global Forum 2020 in  Phoenix, Arizona. 

Experience gained

During my internship, I got a detailed understanding of how a Hyperledger Fabric network works, how to set it up, how to take advantage of its pluggable consensus model and how to make it secure. I also gained a lot of experience with Kubernetes and helm charts.

I have contributed to other open-source projects in the past, and Nepos is one of the most organized repositories I’ve seen. Working closely with my mentors, who built this open-source project from the ground up, gave me a lot of insights into how to effectively build and maintain an open-source project.

More details are available in my final project report.

Sep 19
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2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: X.509 Certificate Transparency using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program

Goal

The 2019 Hyperledger Summer Mentorship program for full-time interns has came to an end. During this program my project was x509 certificate transparency using Hyperledger Fabric. This project aimed at

  • developing the Hyperledger Fabric infrastructure for ensuring SSL certificate transparency using blockchain (a.k.a. CTB)
  • setting up CTB over cloud.
  • making a Firefox extension for browser client application. 
  • benchmarking CTB-assisted SSL/TLS handshake duration.

Project Progress

While working on this project, I focused on feature-driven development and completed one task at a time. Timeline:

  • The project started with the paper provided by my mentors on design and logic behind CTB. Based on the architecture described in the paper, I created the initial version of CTB. 
  • Then I added blockchain explorer to CTB for monitoring transactions and blocks.
  • Next came creating a CA interface and rest API for interacting with CTB.
  • At this point, we were ready to deploy CTB. We started with one server on DigitalOcean.
  • Initially, we had bash scripts for testing query and invocation of the chaincode. Later, we moved to automated testing using Hyperledger Caliper.
  • To match real-world scenarios where CAs would be progressively joining CTB, I worked on addition of new organisation across multiple Docker environments.
  • Next, I created another droplet on DigitalOcean and bootstrapped the process of new CA org (on this server) joining CTB.
  • Then it was on to creating a Firefox extension.
  • Finally, it was time to  issue a self-signed certificate for ctb-testing.ml and another for hfctb.ml signed by letsencrypt on CTB. These are for demonstration purposes.

By the end of this project, different pieces of CTB started coming together. The final architecture of CTB is explained through the below diagram:

Learning

This internship has been an informative and skill-driven learning experience for me. I learned a lot from the Hyperledger community and gained critical experience and expertise in a number of areas, including: 

  • Working with openssl tool and certificates and understanding how PKI works.
  • Hands-on learning of Docker and cloud orchestration while deploying CTB.
  • Understanding the way identities are maintained within Hyperledger Fabric, role of peers and orderers, structure of crypto-config.
  • Writing chaincode and developing application for interaction with Fabric.
  • Using Hyperledger Fabric, blockchain-explorer and Hyperledger Caliper. While I was focused on Fabric, I also looked into Composer.

Future Plans

This project is still in development stage. With more functionalities and scaling, it can be used in production. Some of the tasks that we have in this project’s timeline are:

  • Revocation of certificate improvements: Currently when a certificate is revoked, the browser uses an extension to get status of certificate. A better solution is to directly integrate OCSP or OCSP stapling with CTB.
  • Chrome extension: Currently, Google Chrome does not provide an API to retrieve the SSL information including the domain certificates that the extension needs. Once it is available, we plan to build a Chrome extension too.
  • Scaling: Test different configuration of CTB on bigger network of servers.

For the full details, see my complete project report here.

I will continue to work on CTB in the future (post internship) and be a part of this great community!

Credits

First of all, none of this would not have been possible without my mentors (Mahavir Jhawar and Deva Madala) and other members of the Hyperledger community. Min Yu provided quick response to my queries and regular updates on the internship program. Hyperledger chat and Jira proved to be useful. So, a huge shout-out to them for helping and guiding me when I was clueless on how to proceed. While I was busy coding, my mentor oversaw the direction in which this project was going and pointed changes/additions to me. This kept me busy throughout the summer and helped me complete my project. 

Last, but not the least, I would like to thank my fellow applicants who also worked on developing Hyperledger Fabric, blockchain explorer and Hyperledger Caliper, which can be used in the next iteration of CTB.

Aug 26
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Simplifying Number Portability with Blockchain

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are now showcasing confidence in areas where they can collaborate with their competitors to achieve better operational efficiency, make savings in cost and improve customer experience. There are numerous use cases where CSPs can collaborate to overcome the challenges that they currently face. Blockchain technology can serve as a platform where multiple stakeholders can collaborate in a consortium formed to achieve a common objective.

CSPs are exploring real-time use cases that can be implemented over blockchain and have the potential to transform the world by enabling transparency in existing processes. Number portability (NP) is one of the key use cases where operators across the world provide services and allow their subscribers to port out to another network. This requires their platform(s) to facilitate smooth transition of subscribers without losing unused prepaid balance and data sharing over a secure channel. In number portability operations, information exchange is possible between CSPs directly or via an intermediary but financial transactions or value exchanges are not possible or easy. With the evolution of blockchain technology, information and value can be exchanged securely and transparently while the porting process itself can be simplified without an intermediary. Sharing of telecom infrastructure among CSPs is becoming a need and a business process in the telecom industry where competitors are becoming partners to lower their increasing investments. This concept of tower or mast sharing is being encouraged across the globe and CSPs are looking for a trustworthy platform to manage the B2B contracts for tower sharing. 

At Wipro, we are working with a number of CSPs to tackle the challenge of number portability using a Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain solution.

Challenges of Number Portability

For end users

  • False rejection of port-out requests by CSP
  • Re-submission of KYC documents for every number porting request
  • Long waiting period to port-out successfully
  • High porting fees charged by service providers
  • Losing prepaid balance while porting

For CSPs

  • High OPEX for NP management for service providers
  • Additional costs for lookup services, routing services and interconnection
    for ported numbers
  • Longer time duration and complex process for porting validation

For regulatory authorities

  • Numerous complaints from users regarding port-out rejections and delays
  • Long duration for porting process and users are levied porting charges
  • Non-compliance of porting regulation by service providers
  • Lack of transparency in porting process

Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain platform with an efficient consensus mechanism and permissioned membership services that can be leveraged to onboard participants in the blockchain network. The identity of the nodes and users, who are the members of this network, can be validated against the organizations’ identity management system. Therefore, there are no anonymous users in such a network. Managed Service Provider (MSP) is also called the Certificate Authority (CA) in Fabric parlance. The platform provides tools for MSP certificate generation. Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chain code” that comprise the application logic of the system. There is no proof-of-work (POW) algorithm and crypto mining in Fabric, and it delivers high scalability and fast transactions. Rich queries over the immutable distributed ledger are supported. Hyperledger Fabric offers a modular architecture where developers can create plug-in components.

CSPs will have numerous benefits by adopting Hyperledger Fabric for real time use cases like Number Portability:

  1. Simplified porting process – The current porting process is slow because of delays in unique porting code (UPC) generation, eligibility checks for porting and various other reasons associated with the mediating party. Hyperledger Fabric, with its distributed database capabilities, removes the mediating party and simplifies the process and allows exchange of information among parties. 
  2. Secure exchange of user data – Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise permissioned platform that provides an immutable and secure exchange of information between the parties of the blockchain network.
  3. Cost sharing or financial transactions over blockchain network – Prepaid users lose their unused balance during porting. Blockchain can facilitate the transfer of financial value between the CSPs over a secure and permissioned network.
  4. Reduced operational costs and routing costs – Hyperledger Fabric, being a distributed ledger technology, allows for removal of an intermediary party. It has a direct impact on cost. With a distributed set up, each CSP has a routing number in their own distributed database thus saving the routing related costs.
  5. Real-time and full transparency for CSPs, regulators and users – All the processes between various parties in a blockchain network can be monitored in real-time. All records, statuses and logs are registered in an immutable ledger and become fully auditable. Regulators will not only have full visibility but will also have the power to strictly enforce regulatory rules.

In number portability, information exchange is possible between CSPs directly or via an intermediary, but financial transactions or value exchange is not easy. As new emerging technologies disrupt the Telecom industry, these problems can become a thing of the past. Solutions built on enterprise blockchain have the potential to transform the world by enabling transparent environments that do not rely on trust. Our Hyperledger Fabric-powered solution, allows non-trusting parties to transact, trade and exchange information and value without intermediaries in between. With the evolution of Hyperledger Fabric technology, information and value can be exchanged securely and transparently while the porting process itself can be simplified, all without an intermediary.

About the author

Subrat Saurabh, Principal Consultant, Blockchain & Telco Domain Expert, Communication BU at Wipro Ltd, has more than 12 years’ experience in IT Solutions delivery, domain, technology, and the telco industry. He has deployed wholesale billing and number portability solutions for global clients and is a certified Scrum Master. Subrat holds a Bachelor’s degree in Telecom Engineering. He is a published author of two books (fiction) and received the award for being amongst the top hundred inspiring authors from India in 2018.

Jun 24
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Change Healthcare: 50 million transactions a day using Hyperledger Fabric

By Blog, Healthcare, Hyperledger Fabric

Change Healthcare is on a mission to modernize the American healthcare system. A central part of that plan is extending its Intelligent Healthcare Network with blockchain technology to provide a faster, better experience for all.  

Change Healthcare operates the largest healthcare network in the country. Formed through years of mergers and acquisition, the healthcare infrastructure company links 900,000 healthcare providers and 5,500 hospitals with 2,200 government and commercial payers.

A network of this scale, built from a mix of companies, means a very complex back end with lots of systems that are working independently. To unite information and give customers faster, better access to data, Change Healthcare turned to Hyperledger Fabric to begin blockchain-enabling its Intelligent Healthcare Network.

The starting point was modeling an existing network linking providers to payers with a blockchain and then seeing if it could stand up to real-world traffic. After testing and assessing options, Change Healthcare’s launched this initial Hyperledger Fabric-powered network in January 2018. It’s been running as a parallel network since, processing as many as 50 million transactions a day—with throughput up to 550 transactions a second. That’s enough to handle all the healthcare claims activity that Change Healthcare handles across its full network.

The Hyperledger team has worked closely with Change Healthcare to document this large-scale network deployment and its performance in a detailed case study. Highlights include system criteria and planning, details on the supported workflow and transactions and future directions, including plans for ensuring interoperability, boosting throughput even further and migrating more business partners to the network.


CLICK HERE TO READ THE CASE STUDY

Apr 26
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(3.31.2019) Packt: Installing a blockchain network using Hyperledger Fabric and Composer[Tutorial]

By Hyperledger Fabric, News

This article is an excerpt taken from the book Hands-On IoT Solutions with Blockchain written by Maximiliano Santos and Enio Moura. In this book, you’ll learn how to work with problem statements and learn how to design your solution architecture so that you can create your own integrated Blockchain and IoT solution.

In this article, you will learn how to install your own blockchain network using Hyperledger Fabric and Composer.

View the full article here.

Apr 24
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Developer showcase series: Juan Navarro, Biztribution

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Juan Navarro of Biztribution.

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

First, I recommend having a look at Anders Brownworth’s website “how blockchain works”. It’s a very easy way to understand how and why blockchain works. Next, add some PKI infrastructure reading to know who did what and… congratulations! Now, you know the foundations of blockchain.

When it comes to Hyperledger Fabric, don’t let the seeming complexity make you reluctant to dive in. At first sight, Hyperledger Fabric may look a bit overwhelming  with a lot of different technologies and configuration files.. However, to quote Albert Einstein: “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” Don’t be afraid of the vast amount of documentation you can find about Hyperledger. Instead, I recommend, start with the Fabric demo. Then, watch Chaincode for developers and some of the other online examples. Suddenly, everything will begin to make sense and you will start to understand the architecture and its beauty.

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 project is related to giving governance of content distribution back to airlines. Airlines are competitors and partners at the same time. For that reason, they have to share some information continuously and keep other information private. In order to achieve that today, they rely on third parties that centralize all their data to retail their contents, specifically over indirect channels. We have identified blockchain as the answer to solve this puzzle, and Hyperledger Fabric as the technology the industry needs.

What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

We are mainly working with Hyperledger Fabric. At the moment, we have successfully done several lab proofs-of-concept with millions of routes, availabilities, fares, geographic data, etc. It is amazing to see how the information flows among peers.

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

  • Pluggable interfaces and documentation.
  • Performance metrics as a function of transactions/sec, peers, consensus, channels, participants, orderers, etc. It would be great to get an answer to the white paper published by the Performance and Scalability Working Group.
  • Guidelines about how many orderers we need to deploy as a function of organizations, transactions, peers, performance, etc.

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?

Sovereign ID initiatives. I am very careful about sharing my personal data. I have always asked myself “why do I have to give my ID when I subscribe to a service, in hotels, shops, etc.?” Are there other alternatives that fulfill regulatory requirements and preserve my privacy at the same time?

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

Well, our goal is to reinvent an  industry by creating a new revolutionary, automated and simple distribution model for the travel and tourism ecosystem. Based on Distributed Ledger Technology, we enable airlines to regain control over their contents. This creates a shift towards a fully decentralized scenario in which flexibility and de-commoditization are achieved, translating into more efficient operations and a significant reduction in  distribution costs.

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

I hope to see Hyperledger in a lot of interactions on a daily basis where  end users are not even able to perceive that Hyperledger is working behind the scenes. That’s the magic of technology!

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t write a single line of code until you have a clear understanding of what you want to get done.

What technology could you not live without?

Short answer: Linux and… Linux!

At home, I’m a big fan of Raspberry Pi because you have a great computer with a very low energy consumption and no noise. With it, I have IPTV, home automation, VPN and content filtering for kids.

At work, micro services architecture! Once you try it, you can’t live without it!

Apr 10
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Hyperledger Indy Graduates To Active Status; Joins Fabric And Sawtooth As “Production Ready” Hyperledger Projects

By Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Sawtooth

By Steven Gubler, Hyperledger Indy contributor and Sovrin infrastructure and pipeline engineer

The Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) just approved Indy to be the third of Hyperledger’s twelve projects to graduate from incubation to active status.

This is a major milestone as it shows that Hyperledger’s technical leadership recognizes the maturity of the Indy project. The TSC applies rigorous standards to active projects including code quality, security best practices, open source governance, and a diverse pool of contributors. Becoming an active Hyperledger project is a sign that Indy is ready for prime time and is a big step forward for the project and the digital identity community.

Hyperledger Indy is a distributed ledger purpose-built for decentralized identity. This ledger leverages blockchain technology to enable privacy-preserving digital identity. It provides a decentralized platform for issuing, storing, and verifying credentials that are transferable, private, and secure.

Hyperledger Indy grew out of the need for an identity solution that could face the issues that plague our digital lives like identity theft, lack of privacy, and the centralization of user data. Pioneers in self-sovereign identity realized we could fix many of these issues by creating verifiable credentials that are anchored to a blockchain with strong cryptography and privacy preserving protocols. To this end, the private company Evernym and the non profit Sovrin Foundation teamed up with Hyperledger to contribute the source code that became Hyperledger Indy. The project has advanced significantly due to the efforts of these two organizations and many teams and individuals from around the world.

A diverse ecosystem of people and organizations are already building real-world solutions using Indy. The Sovrin Foundation has organized the largest production network powered by Indy. The Province of British Columbia was the first to deploy a production use case to the Sovrin Network with its pioneering work on Verifiable Organizations Network, a promising platform for managing trust at an institutional level. Evernym, IBM, and others are bringing to market robust commercial solutions for managing credentials. Many other institutions, researchers, and enthusiasts are also actively engaged in improving the protocols, building tools, contributing applications, and bringing solutions to production.

The team behind the project is excited about current efforts that will lead to increased scalability, better performance, easier development tools, and greater security. User agents for managing Indy credentials are under active development, making it easy to adopt Indy as an identity solution for diverse use cases.

If you’d like to support Indy, join our community and contribute! Your contributions will help to fix digital identity for everyone. You can participate in the discussions or help write the code powering Indy. Together, we will build a better platform for digital identity.A