Oracle introduced a swathe of new features to add a layer of tools on top of Hyperledger Fabric 1.3. Many of the features enhance developer productivity and make it easier to administer and integrate the network with existing systems.
View the full article here.
Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Raj Sadaye.
What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?
One piece of advice I would offer someone interested in getting started with blockchain is to start working on a project or an application using the technology that they want to learn. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate or a complicated application, but could be something that has utility in the real world. While working on it, they might face difficulties or technical setbacks. The best way to tackle this is to reach out to the community of several other developers who are currently maintaining/ working on that technology. We can learn a lot by working on a project and reading the documentation thoroughly.
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?
My interest in blockchains developed when I was searching for a method to secure IoT device communication as well as make it de-centralized to increase speed. Blockchain technology turned out to be the perfect solution for this. Over the past 8 months, I’ve worked on several projects at Arizona State University’s Blockchain research Lab. In March 2018, I worked on building a PoC for a Carbon credits trading ecosystem using blockchain for Lightworks at ASU. The system enables various players of the market to control carbon emissions while maintaining sustainable growth by incentivizing carbon capturing actors. A brief description of this project can be found here. Currently, we’re working with the Center for Negative Emission of Carbon to design a way to verify capture as well as emission of carbon with minimal human intervention. My current research focus is developing a data sharing protocol that enables edge to edge communication in IoT devices. I’ve also been working on building the CSE 598: Engineering Blockchain Applications course on Coursera for Arizona State University.
What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?
Primarily, I’ve been working with Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer and overall, the experience has been really good. Hyperledger Fabric has a good set of tools to build the infrastructure for a distributed ledger solution. The certification authority is a high-quality tool that helps us with cryptographic validation and dynamically assigning certificates for actors being added to the network. Once a person is familiar with the documentation, it’s really simple to go about building applications. Hyperledger Composer is a tool that excited me the most over the last 8 month because it runs on top of Hyperledger Fabric and it can help a blockchain novice on how to build a distributed application. Both frameworks have really good tutorial sections that help developers get familiar with the technology.
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?
In my opinion, supply chains and blockchain technology were always meant to go hand in hand. The most interesting app or use case that I’ve been recently come across is Everledger. Everledger rewires trust and confidence in a previously broken market by building consortiums of actors participating and maintaining provenance by supplementing blockchain technology with various other verification techniques. In the near future, I see other products also adopt such an architecture to avoid counterfeiting and adultery.
What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?
One issue I’m hoping to be solved using blockchain technology is verification of identity through digitization of personal documents. Verification of documents using hash-based fingerprinting assigning ownership of this digital record to the person rather than a centralized authority can help a lot in maintaining the privacy of data as well as avoiding frauds through detection of counterfeit documents being used.
Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in 5 years?
In 5 years, I expect blockchain technology to move over the crypto-hype and focus on the real applications and use cases that it be integrated with. For Hyperledger, the most interesting upcoming project, in my opinion, is Hyperledger Quilt which aims to achieve interoperability in blockchains. I’d also like to see a solution within the Hyperledger project that enables seamless integration of blockchain application with the existing infrastructure.
Growing community, new project developments and accelerating pace of deployments mark start of 2019
SAN FRANCISCO (January 30, 2019) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, begins 2019 by announcing it has added eight new members to the consortium. In addition, Hyperledger has delivered some key technology updates and now has a total of 12 projects.
Hyperledger is a multi-venture, multi-stakeholder effort that includes various enterprise blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Recent project updates include the release of Fabric v1.4 LTS, the first long term support version of the framework, as well as the addition of two new projects Hyperledger Ursa and Hyperledger Grid. Grid uses shared, reusable tools to accelerate the development of ledger-based solutions for cross-industry supply chain applications. Additionally, a detailed case study on Circulor’s Hyperledger Fabric-based production system for tracing tantalum mining in Rwanda adds to growing list of resources for guiding enterprise blockchain adoption.
“We wrapped up 2018 with a successful and exciting Hyperledger Global Forum,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “This first worldwide meeting of the Hyperledger community underscored the growing pace of development and deployment of blockchain in general and our tools and technologies in particular. We are seeing more signs of this accelerating pace of maturation and adoption here in early 2019. We welcome these newest members and look forward to their help in driving this growth.”
Hyperledger allows organizations to create solid, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by offering enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases. The latest general members to join the community are BTS Digital LLP, Exactpro Systems Limited, Jitsuin, Lares Blockchain, Myndshft, Omnigate, Poste Italiane and Wrapious Marketing Co Ltd.
New member quotes:
“We are an emerging company aiming at creating a national digital ecosystem in Kazakhstan that will facilitate the basic processes of human life and provide equal access to resources,” said Eugene Volkov, Chief Digital Officer, BTS Digital LLP. “As we see accelerated growth of transactions and actors in today’s life, we acknowledge the growing need to build a trustworthy society where all the participants can act with consensus, immutability, equality and transparency. Building such an environment requires trust. Our trust in Hyperledger’s expertise is a primary reason why we choose to become a member. We believe this community will guide us in finding technological solutions in achieving our goals.”
“Being a firm strategically focused on providing the highest level QA services for mission-critical market infrastructures, Exactpro understands the important role of this new technology and strives to enhance our expertise in this area through collaboration with leading blockchain consortia such as Hyperledger,” said Maxim Rudovsky, CTO, Exactpro. “We firmly believe our Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation memberships will provide Exactpro with access to community resources that will help us deliver more profound testing of DLT-based software systems to our clients.”
“One of the founding decisions we made at Jitsuin was to become a Hyperledger member,” said Jon Geater, Chief Technology Officer, Jitsuin. “As part of our mission to unlock the value of data in the Internet of Things, we focus on Industrial IoT device lifecycle assurance where security, price, reliability and shared responsibility are all crucial. Keeping IoT in a known, good state is a team sport and is exactly where distributed ledger technologies work best. I am also delighted to continue serving the Governing Board and Hyperledger community to help ensure it remains the unrivaled home of advanced cross-industry business blockchain technologies.”
“Lares Blockchain Security is delighted to join the Hyperledger community,” said Chris McGarrigle, CEO, Lares Blockchain Security. “Hyperledger’s fundamental strengths of performance, scalability and security resonate with our core values at Lares Blockchain Security. As our blockchain products and technologies continue to gain momentum in the medical, biotech, mining and financial industries, we see our partnership with Hyperledger as critical to further establishing ourselves in the enterprise.”
“Blockchain presents an enormous opportunity for healthcare to simplify and unify claims management, prior authorizations and other administrative functions, helping payers and providers reduce costs and improve timeliness and quality of care,” said Ron Wince, CEO, Myndshft Technologies. “That is why Myndshft is thrilled to join Hyperledger and collaborate with blockchain leaders and innovators across industries to find ways to leverage the technology to increase efficiency of healthcare operations, improve the patient experience and optimize financial performance in the value-based care era.”
“Omnigate Systems is delighted to join Hyperledger and to leverage blockchain technologies to drive interoperability in finance. Omnigate provides enterprise-grade, universal ledger software with extensive integrations. Our mission is to empower businesses of any size to rapidly build production-grade transactional systems for both traditional assets and emerging digital assets,” said Raphael Carrier, CEO, Omnigate. “We consider the integration of the Interledger protocol (via Hyperledger Quilt) into our product to be a key milestone. We believe this is an important initiative which will advance interoperability and accessibility to the ‘Internet of Value.'”
“Blockchain is not just a buzzword or a myth anymore, but is becoming the foundation for establishing a distributed, transparent and cross-industry interoperable ecosystem,” said Mirko Mischiatti, Chief Information Officer, Poste Italiane. “Poste Italiane wants to actively participate in this new and exciting community by becoming a member of Hyperledger in order to continue its path for the innovation and modernization of financial, logistic and insurance industries. We really look forward to working with other members and making our effort to contribute for the enhancement of blockchain technology.”
“It is our honor to become a member of the Hyperledger community,” said Tommy Wong, Chief Operating Officer, Wrapious Marketing Co Ltd. “Joining Hyperledger provides us with more opportunity to explore more within the blockchain space and to contribute to project developments. Our vision is to create a virtual world that provides equal access to everyone regardless of their status or social class in the community. We believe being part of Hyperledger will add to our ability to achieve this vision.”
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/.
Two firms, the recognized bank Barclays and the U.K.-based startup Clearmatics are calling coders to connect Ethereum with enterprise-blockchains, including Hyperledger Fabric. Although blockchain technology has expanded all over the world, there are still some operability issues that must be solved and enhanced in the future.
View the full article here.
The system has reportedly been built on the Hyperledger Fabric which the developers believe can be easily deployed and is also more cost effective.
The blockchain to be implemented is set to be a private and secure means of communication with air traffic services.
View the full article here.
The latest release of Hyperledger Fabric, v1.4 marks a very important milestone: it is the first LTS release. This means that the Fabric maintainers will provide bug fixes for a period of one year [from the date of release: January 10, 2019].
View the full article here.
The real-world impact of blockchain is growing quickly with the upswing of production systems bringing new approaches to complex problems. One such case: a supply chain solution powered by Hyperledger blockchain technology is providing critical traceability to tantalum mining in Rwanda. This mineral, widely used in the manufacturing of electronics and medical and dental devices and implants, is plentiful and a key to economic development in Rwanda. However, mining practices in nearby regions are muddying the supply chain, making some tantalum a potential “conflict mineral.” To protect against conflict concerns and practices and thus ensure investment and stability in Rwanda-sourced tantalum, the Rwandan Mining, Petroleum and Gas Board turned to a blockchain system to increase transparency in the mining supply chain.
Circulor, a U.K based startup, working with mining company, Power Resources Group (PRG), piloted a system built on Hyperledger Fabric that creates an immutable record of custody to trace Rwandan tantalum from the mine to the manufacturer.
We sat down with Circulor to get the details on rolling out this Hyperledger Fabric network and plans for future development. This case study is a great roadmap for others looking to out Hyperledger into action. You can read it here.
If you’re curious about other production use cases with Hyperledger technology, be sure to check out this list of six intriguing initiatives across a wide range of industries, including food supply, fine art, insurance, aviation and accounting. You can also take a look at our other case studies here.
I’m very curious and I love to meet people from all over the world. I’m fascinated by new technologies, learning what can be done, seeing what has been done and realizing the potential.
Meeting like-minded, open people is the favorite way my team at 4eyes and I satisfy our curiosity. Learning from each other, sharing experiences and discussing problems and questions is the best way to achieve this.
Tangible results are sometimes difficult to see in software frameworks, and perhaps more so within the DLT/Blockchain space. However, they are very important to understanding the technology and its potential. So looking at projects in various stages from prototype to production is immensely helpful for us and, eventually, for our customers and partners.
With that in mind, we were excited to hear that the global Hyperledger community was getting together in Basel, about 15 minutes from our offices! While I already got an in-person impression of the Hyperledger Community at the Hackfest in Amsterdam and in my activities within the Special Interest Groups for the public sector, it was wonderful to have the whole Hyperledger Community as a guest in my hometown.
I’ve been to dozens of blockchain-related events this year with the Hyperledger Global Forum serving as the grand finale. In my opinion, it was by far the best experience as Hyperledger is the most inclusive, down-to-earth and also self-critical blockchain community. I remember Brian Behlendorf reminding people in a working group call of the importance of honest and transparent communication about Hyperledger as it’s crucial for the credibility and future development of Hyperledger. This spirit permeated the whole conference. While we know that Hyperledger has great frameworks and tools for a broad variety of real-life applications, as open-minded professionals we all realize that there is no one-size-fits-all holy grail kind of solution. This mindset leads to very constructive discussions about the different ways of solving a task.
To satisfy my curiosity, I attended a variety of workshops, especially for those Hyperledger frameworks that were still new to me. So, for example, I experienced Indy hands on in John Jordan’s workshop and learned to bring natural language legal contracts into the blockchain using Accord from Dan Selman. As sharing is a essential part of the learning experience, Waleed El Sayed and I talked about our experience developing blockchain-based projects using Fabric and Composer, which led to very interesting discussions with the audience and also during the rest of the conference. Apart from the inspiring keynotes ranging from consensus and application of blockchain in various industries to philosophy of trust, Global Forum was an opportunity to talk to the broad variety of companies showcasing their products and services.
In terms of my developer skills, the time I spent talking to Caroline Church, IBM’s Lead for Blockchain Tooling, was probably the most impactful. At Accenture’s Hack-For-Good hackathon towards the end of the Forum, Caroline showed us the new way of coding chaincode in Fabric 1.4 and, even more important, the Visual Code extension she created that allows for easy testing and debugging of chaincode. This is a huge step forward in terms of developing chaincode in Fabric. Caroline’s tools will immediately help my team and me and will increase 4eyes’ efficiency dramatically.
From my point of view as a consultant, I learned a lot from the presented use cases, such as the very interesting talk from Marco Alarcon and Andrés Falcone about the Short Sales Lending solution they’ve created at the Santiago Stock Exchange. I was also very impressed by David Berger’s very pragmatic solution to facilitating proof of existence for the legal industry.
As I love to spend time with people all over the world, I skipped one or the other presentation in favor for a in-depth conversations ranging from technical to conceptual during the forum and fun to philosophy during the delegates party at the fantastic Pantheon. This way I met amazing people from all over the world: Japan, France, USA, South Korea, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Switzerland, Russia, China and many more.
My experiences at the Hyperledger Global Forum helped me to assess the possibilities and the maturity of the framework and tools and inspired many new ideas, which in turn will help my team and me to provide better guidance and consultancy for clients and partners.
We are looking forward to the next opportunities to learn and share at upcoming Hyperledger events such as the Hackfest.
The whole 4eyes team and I would love to welcome the Hyperledger family back in Basel in 2019!
Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is John Greenhow of Peloton Blockchain.
What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?
To anyone that wants to get started working on blockchain, my advice is to just start. As we set out, our team had to go through a headspace change similar to moving from assembly to object-oriented.
We picked a platform, picked a simple goal and ran through the installation and a test. More than once if necessary (I installed and setup Fabric twice). As soon as you physically can, look at the files on disk or in the database to see how they change – it will demystify things much more quickly.
We started off with Hyperledger Composer. This was a fantastic way in for us. It allowed us to model the business network we had envisioned and to write and test the necessary logic very quickly, all while going back to check bytes-on-disk to see how things worked under the hood.
My other piece of advice starts with an old saying, “when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. There will be use cases out there to which blockchain is not well suited as a solution, and that’s OK. Spend time looking thinking about eco-systems and business networks and where the cost of a decentralized solution is really going to make a difference to everyone in the network. It will pay off in the long run.
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?
Peloton Blockchain has developed software and a network for the tokenisation, issuance, discovery, listing, secondary trading and redemption of financial instruments and non-financial assets – in a way that is compliant with regulatory jurisdictions around the world.
We can offer efficiencies in primary markets, new distribution channels for issuers and a whole new class of products for exchanges. We have 1 patent pending with 2 further patents in the pipe. Exciting times!
We’ve developed 3 products:
Blockchain in general, and specifically Hyperledger Fabric, provided the best platform upon which we could build. The ability to deploy software to many different organizations and yet retain a trusted view of a ledger of security transactions and ownership opens a utopian vision for many in the capital markets. Blockchain is simply the perfect tool for this job.
What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?
We initially started on Composer and then moved to Fabric as we moved towards a production deployment model. We were sorry to leave Composer behind as it has so many great features – the modeling language and API generation chief among them.
Moving to Fabric involved a re-write into Golang, and we were really surprised by just how much code was needed to port what had been a fairly small project in Composer. I don’t say this to denigrate Fabric but to accentuate the power of Composer.
Our focus now is building out a production network. As well as deploying nodes to participating market operators, issuers and arrangers, we are hosting several nodes around the world to form a reliable back-bone to the network. To do this, we’ve utilized the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and this has been a powerful tool in ensuring scalability.
We’re also looking ahead to production operations, and building web services and management consoles to automate and coordinate everything from upgrades to onboarding new network participants.
What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?
There are several routes available by which Hyperledger can continue to lower barriers to entry for new teams and projects. These include:
Ongoing community out-reach, profile pieces and education remain invaluable and the more the better!
What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?
What really fascinates me about blockchain is that it rarely seems to be the most efficient or low-cost solution available. I’ve had endless conversations with technologists who see a simple, centralized solution as faster…easier…cheaper!
From the perspective of a single organization, this is true. Where the technology comes into its own is in making whole eco-systems of organizations more effective. Blockchain isn’t growing the one slice, it’s growing the whole damn pie.
How successful blockchain projects (in terms of adoption) are seems to depend on the benefits brought to all participants, rather than to a central orchestrator. To the central orchestrator, data is the new oil. Is that still the case if everyone has a copy of that data?
Seen through this filter, there is an implication of more broadly available efficiencies to many industries. This can only be good for economic growth in both developed and high potential markets.
Our project at Peloton Blockchain focuses directly on this, building highly connected networks of issuers, arrangers and exchanges to the benefit of all.
Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in 5 years?
Ultimately blockchain is an application infrastructure layer, much like an RDBMS or messaging bus.
While there is (quite rightly) a lot of research and energy going into blockchain today, the hope is that the layer will become commoditized and that the focus will shift to the solutions that this enables for business networks.
Hyperledger already has projects that are well on the way to making this a reality and we’re really excited to see this continue.
What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?
Test your code!
The pace of blockchain development and deployment is accelerating. Fortunately, so too is the scale and maturity of the community and technology at the core of Hyperledger Fabric. With an eye towards the growing rollout of production Fabric networks, we are pleased to introduce Fabric v1.4 LTS, our first long term support release.
The Fabric developers have been working with network operators and application developers to deliver v1.4 with a focus on production operations and developer ease of use. Key new production-focused features of Fabric fall into four key buckets:
Complete details of the new features can be found in the What’s New documentation and release notes.
Hyperledger Fabric’s First Long Term Support Release.
As noted, Hyperledger Fabric v1.4 LTS marks our first long term support release. This is a critically important development for those beginning to deploy Hyperledger Fabric solutions into production and is a reflection of the confidence that the Fabric maintainers have in this latest release.
Our policy to date has been to provide bug fix (patch) releases for our most recent major or minor release until the next major or minor release has been published. We plan to continue this policy for subsequent releases. However, for Hyperledger Fabric v1.4 LTS, the Fabric maintainers are pledging to provide bug fixes for a period of one year from the date of release (Jan 10). This will likely result in a series of patch releases (v1.4.1, v1.4.2, …), where multiple fixes are bundled into a patch release.
If you are running with Hyperledger Fabric v1.4 LTS, you can be assured that you will be able to safely upgrade to any of the subsequent patch releases. In the advent that there is need of some upgrade process to remedy a defect, we will provide that process with the patch release.
If you’d like to join the community or learn more, you can find more information here:
Chat: #Fabric in Hyperledger Chat
Docs: Fabric 1.4 Documentation
Code: Fabric Github
Issues & Roadmap: Fabric JIRA
Website: Hyperledger Fabric Homepage
Thanks for reading about our newest Fabric release. We encourage developers to try these new features out and give us feedback!