Hyperledger Fabric Archives – Page 2 of 28

Dec 14

Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Blockchain Integration for Climate Emissions Data with Fabric and Cactus

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Cactus, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

The Hyperledger Mentorship Program is a structured hands-on learning opportunity for new developers who may otherwise lack the opportunity to gain exposure to Hyperledger open source development and entry to the technical community. These Mentorship Spotlights highlight the work done by the Mentors and the Mentees as part of their program participation. Learn more here.

Mentorship Project Title	Blockchain Integration for Climate Emissions Data with Fabric and Cactus
Description	To implement an integration from Hyperledger Fabric utility emissions data channel to issue tokens on an Ethereum network using Hyperledger Cactus.
Status	COMPLETED
Difficulty	HIGH
Additional Details	Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Pritam Singh

Indian Insitute of Technology

“I contributed to making the carbon accounting application (a Hyperledger Lab from the Hyperledger Carbon Action SIG) more secure, stable and maintainable. To improve the security of the application, I designed and implemented offline signing of Hyperledger Fabric’s transactions with private keys stored in HashiCorp’s vault server. In order to make the application production ready, I used the Hyperledger Cactus connectors for integrating multiple blockchain. By employing test-driven development, I made the codebase more maintainable. Thanks to the guidance of all my mentors, I was able to achieve all my goals for the mentorship.

Through this mentorship, I got the opportunity to see how community driven projects are developed with contributions coming from across the globe.”

Mentors

Si Chen

Open Source Strategies, Inc

Peter Somogyvari

Accenture

Kamlesh Nagware

Snapper Future Tech

Si Chen

“This mentorship addressed the important issue of how to integrate emissions data stored on Hyperledger Fabric with tokens created in Ethereum. Our mentee had strong technical skills and was able to solve many complex technical challenges in making this integration work. Working on open source projects is a great way for mentees to prepare for the real world as it will give them a chance to work with other developers across different areas, figure out existing code and learn the importance of communicating well. For mentors, it’s a great way to introduce new talent into our projects and keep them moving forward.”

Peter Somogyvari

“Being a mentor on this project gave me unique insight into the fight against climate change and put me in touch a lot of great people who are leading the charge on the latter. Pritam, our mentee, demonstrated excellent analytical and technical skills and a true understanding of the open-source software development principles, which puts him on track to do great things in the future both within and outside of the Linux Foundation/Hyperledger.”

Kamlesh Nagware

“Blockchain interoperability is a key topic this year with many enterprises focusing research on it. Hyperledger Cactus provides decentralized, secure and adaptable integration between blockchain networks. In this mentorship project, the main focus was on using Hyperledger Cactus for carbon accounting and carbon credit tokenization to support the blockchain-carbon-accounting project, a Hyperlegder Lab from the Climate Action SIG. Completion of this project shows that interoperability is not just a theory but can be achieved with the right design architecture and approach. Thanks to our mentee, Pritam Singh, for a wonderful job completing this project. And, in the last, thanks to my co-mentors Peter Somogyvari, Cactus Maintainer, for his support and to Si Chen for the proposing this mentorship project.”

A special thanks to the Hyperledger member companies for funding this important program. To learn more about our Hyperledger Mentorship Program and how you can participate in our next cohort, head over to our program overview page on the Hyperledger wiki.

Dec 14

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MineHub and KrypC Leverage the Power of Hyperledger Fabric 2.2 to Transform Mining and Metals Supply Chain

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Member Case Study, Supply Chain

Read the full case study here.

Nearly 1.8 trillion USD of metals and minerals move across the world every year from mines, through ports, along transport lines, to processing plants and, ultimately, to the end users. This chain includes hundreds of companies making millions of transactions. Many of these still use manual processes—actual or digital—that require staff resources to process.

MineHub wanted to create a decentralized collaboration platform to solve this problem. The company envisioned a solution that would transform the supply chain workflows and processes for the mining and metals industry. Its solution wouldn’t just improve the practical day-to-day operations. Once in place, this robust, agile platform would help users mitigate damage from unpredictable global disruptions, reduce costs and make more profit due to higher efficiencies and end-to-end visibility of their data.

MineHub was setting out to connect hundreds of companies — from large, international corporations to small, local businesses. Each of these organizations would have unique needs and requirements. To deliver this platform, MineHub realized it needed the power of Private Data Collections (PDCs) that became available with Hyperledger Fabric 2. PDCs deliver critical functionality for bringing together a large group of diverse companies with differing needs and commercial interests and allowing them to exchange business critical data in a secure, private, and scalable manner. They would also need the flexibility to add new organizations and manage them dynamically.

Enter KrypC, a company that understands enterprises that want to work together across interconnected workflows need a single version of truth and that blockchain technology can provide this. From the beginning, KrypC has been focused on leveraging Hyperledger Fabric to build technologies that help enterprises adopt and develop blockchain solutions. The team there was working towards addressing the very challenges MineHub was looking to solve through its Hyperledger Fabric layer 2 platform, KrypCore. After a few discussions, it became clear a partnership between them made sense.

KrypC’s configurable KrypCore platform offers the agility to quickly create and add new functionalities to a decentralized system and to deploy them seamlessly in smart contracts. KrypCore offers a unique and unrivalled approach to performing asynchronous system updates and upgrades amongst a wide variety of users operating on entirely different IT infrastructures.

With their toolsets, KrypC is able to offer users of decentralized applications a seamless solution to manage security updates and enable rapid addition of new features. By solving for this challenge, MineHub was able to redirect their focus on the user functionality and business value they wanted to unlock for its customers.

Hyperledger Foundation worked with KrypC and Minehub on a case study that details the business and technical challenges of building a platform that connects thousands of companies of diverse sizes without prior relationships and the roles each company plays in the solution. In addition, the case study delves into why and how the release of Hyperledger Fabric 2.2 was key to getting the MineHub to market and what comes next for the supply chain platform.

Read the full case study here.

Dec 07

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Use of NLP and DLT to Enable Digitalization of Telecom Roaming Agreements

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

Mentorship Project Title	Use of NLP and DLT to Enable Digitalization of Telecom Roaming Agreements
Description	In first phase, to collect and gather the main GSMA templates and previous agreements from CSPs, analyze those agreements text and define the main features to build the NLP model; in second phase, to map the drafting and negotiation process into the smart contract logic that will enable at the end constructing the draft agreement utilizing the NLP model constructed from the first phase; and, in third phase, to build a simple UI that will handle demonstrating building a simple agreement utilizing the outcome of the first and second phase.
Status	COMPLETED
Difficulty	HIGH
Additional Details	Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Santiago Figueroa Lorenzo

University of Navarra

“Throughout this great experience, I have gained expertise in the principles of roaming agreements as well as in a completely new areas of knowledge for me such as Natural Language Processing (NLP). Moreover, I have been able to integrate different programming languages, technologies and methodologies such as Golang, NodeJS, Python, ReactJS, NLP, HFB, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Docker and CI/CD. Additionally, I consider that I have improved my skills as a researcher and Medium articles writer. Finally, I found that the Hyperledger open source community is friendly and people there are always willing to help.”

Mentors

Ahmad Sghaier

University of Waterloo

Noureddin Sadawi

Softlight Tech

Ahmad Sghaier

“While I was already involved in a number of activities in the Hyperledger community, through the Special Interest groups and as a co-organizer of meetup group, I found that the mentorship program can be another venue for a contribution based on the development of a use case related to telecom business management. This project was a good way to explore further the benefits a permissioned blockchain network can offer in automating business processes that require elevated level of trust. Over these few weeks, I am proud of the work performed by Santiago. He showed the capability to grasp different concepts and, through the project, how we could combine the two proposed technologies to solve the problem at hand. As a mentor, I learned about other open source tools in the Hyperledger ecosystem that I was not aware of that provided great value to the proof of concept”

Noureddin Sadawi

“This is a really interesting project and what attracted me the most to it was the fact that it combines blockchain and smart contract technology with natural language processing (NLP) technology. Our mentee, Santiago Figueroa, is an intelligent, hard-working young man who has learned and improved noticeably throughout the course of this project. Santiago has used components from existing previous projects, which highlights the importance of finalising useful projects and making them reusable. Some of the many lessons learned include believing in our ability and not giving up easily when encountering obstacles. Also, patience and resilience are key to carrying out projects like this one. Seeing mentees from all over the world working on these projects is refreshing and encouraging.”

Dec 06

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Hyperledger Aries Integration to Support Fabric as Blockchain Ledger

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

Mentorship Project Title	Hyperledger Fabric – Hyperledger Aries Integration to support Fabric as blockchain ledger
Description	This project aims to enable Aries to interact with Fabric as a ledger, which would then enable Self Sovereign Identity applications to be built on top of Fabric.
Status	COMPLETED
Difficulty	HIGH
Additional Details	Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Harsh Multani

“I have been using Hyperledger technologies for the past two years. The most valuable insights that I gained from this are how a project can be planned and executed. I learnt that, if you plan, document and discuss a task clearly with your mentors and the people in the community, the time it takes to complete it is considerably lower and you don’t need to do any rework for it. This experience also improved my techniques in maintaining proper code and designing the code keeping conventions in mind. Finally, I learnt a lot about Hyperledger Fabric architecture as well as Hyperledger Indy and Docker networks.”

Mentor

Kamlesh Nagware

Snapper Future Tech

Kamlesh Nagware

“I have been part of the Hyperledger ecosystem for the last five years and seen it grow to 18 projects, including DLTs, libraries and tools for efficient blockchain development and deployment. Hyperledger Fabric is the most used DLT in enterprise applications, and decentralised identity (DID)/self-sovereign identity (SSI) applications have grown in the last three to four years. To support Fabric as a ledger for Hyperledger Aries will increase the adoption of DID/SSI in enterprises by adding the flexibility to use Fabric as a ledger for SSI/DID systems and will create more interoperability within the Hyperledger ecosystem. It is a really interesting project. I have learnt lot as a mentor and got the opportunity to contribute more to the Hyperledger ecosystem. My mentee, Harsh, did really well. He completed this project and now we are planning to propose this as a Hyperledger Lab to build out the future roadmap.”

Nov 30

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Hyperledger in Action Across Asia

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth

It’s #HyperledgerAsia month, so we are spotlighting the fast-growing adoption and deployment of Hyperledger technologies throughout the region. Companies across Asia are driving a nonstop stream of innovative new enterprise blockchain implementations ranging from global shipping networks and international digital health passports to training certification and secure document solutions.

Read on for just a sampling of the solutions at work across Asia powered by Hyperledger technologies. And join the conversation using #HyperledgerAsia on social channels.

BondbloX Bond Exchange

Singapore-based BondEvalue broke through barriers when it unveiled the world’s first blockchain-based bond exchange that allows investors to trade BondbloX Bond Exchange (BBX) – $1,000 fractions of traditional wholesale bonds. This leads to better access and better diversification opportunities for a market that is typically inaccessible except to more wealthy investors.

BBX leverages the Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain technology to fractionlize bonds, make trading highly transparent and more cost effective. Settlement on BBX is on a T+0 basis, that is within seconds instead of the normal two-day settlement cycle, thereby reducing counterparty settlement risks for investors.

BondEvalue continues to engage more member participants such as Taurus Wealth Advisors, the leading fee-based, multi-family wealth management firm in Singapore, and Amstel, an institutional fixed-income broker with operations across Asia and Europe. BondEvalue is also expanding its footprint with a joint venture partnership in Mexico. The company’s goal is to empower a more diverse pool of investors and introduce them to institutional-grade opportunities in the bond market through its cutting-edge blockchain solution.

Global Shipping Business Network

Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN), headquartered in Hong Kong, is a neutral trade data utility platform whose members include container carriers and terminal operators/ports that handle one in three containers worldwide. It is built on a Hyperledger Fabric-based permissioned blockchain with strong data governance where only authorized parties are granted the right to contribute and consume shipping related data. By leveraging immutability of the blockchain and data field level privacy through cryptography, participants in the supply chain such as terminals, carriers, shippers, freight forwarders, truckers, customs and financial institutions, can collaboratively design and enable industry wide, end to end, solutions. The platform was developed in partnership with Oracle, Microsoft, AntChain and Alibaba Cloud.

[markets]^N

Developed by KoinEarth and deployed using Hyperledger Fabric on Oracle Blockchain, [markets]^N is a secure B2B platform that’s used by India-based Hindalc, the world’s largest aluminum rolling company, to get a higher degree of visibility into its inventory and supply chain and enforce its SLAs with service providers. This includes tracking and monitoring of purchasing orders, shipments and invoices in real-time, in coordination with its suppliers.

Mindtree’s Digital Health Passport for Travel

Post-pandemic passenger air travel is constantly evolving due to border restrictions and COVID-related mandates. The need of the hour for airlines is to have a comprehensive and adaptive solution that informs and educates travelers, airline staff, airport authorities and government in real-time about COVID test requirements, safety protocols, vaccines and other regulations. Mindtree’s Digital Health Passport for Travel solution, which is built using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology, promises to do exactly this and thereby make post-pandemic global airline travel seamless, hassle-free, and safe.

MiFix Gateway

KrypC partnered with New Street Technologies to implement a blockchain marketplace for lending built on Hyperledger Fabric. MiFix Gateway is a distributed private network where participating financial institutions can access qualified leads and compete for customers seeking loans. Lenders view the credit score and personal information of each lead and offer competitive loans based on this information. MiFix provides a single platform where banks can earn revenue from loan disbursements and customers can obtain the most competitive rates while maintaining complete control of their data.

MiFiX connects remittance providers and banks to reduce interest rates. Though there have been efforts made by banks and financial institutions to provide affordable loans to rural parts of society, the last mile cost of collecting the loan pushes the cost to beyond affordable levels. By connecting the remittance companies in various corridors and lending institutions in India through a blockchain network, MiFiX is facilitating the sharing of remittance and loan information in a trusted and immutable fashion eliminating the collection cost.

SnapCert

SnapCert is a blockchain-based Credential Authentication platform for universities, colleges and institutes. Offered as a SaaS platform by Snapper Future Tech, SnapCert equips education customers to issue and verify credentials on a blockchain, ensuring no fraudulent credentials can be issued in their name.

Customers include Kushal, a social organization that trains unskilled labour under Indian government National Skill Development program. With SnapCert, verifiers can get real-time verification of Kushal credentials directly from the primary source of the data simply using the last four digits of the credential holder’s Aadhaar id and the name. The solution solves the problem of misplaced paper credentials and reduces the trust deficit by providing easy access to credible credentials that prove the holder’s construction training. It also helps Kushal manage long term record keeping for the skilled workers, connect stakeholders that need the data and increase transparency and ease of doing business.

SnapCert is built using Oracle Blockchain, which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric.

Secure Logistics Data Exchange

The Secure Logistics Data Exchange (SLDE) platform was launched by the Ministry of Commerce of India to digitize the generation, exchange, and compliance verification of 36 document types commonly used by banks, customs, freight forwarders, exporters, importers, and transport operations. The SLDE platform, which runs on the Hyperledger Fabric-based Oracle Blockchain, is a solution to replace the present manual process of generation, exchange and compliance of logistics documents with a digitized, secure and seamless document exchange system. It was developed by CargoExchange in conjunction with a number of banks (ICICI, Axis Bank, State Bank of India and HDFC Bank) and the ministry’s Logistics Division.

Tech Mahindra Document Solution

Tech Mahindra, in collaboration with a partner, has built a SaaS platform allowing companies to securely share sensitive documents with anyone within or outside the organization. Supported on Hyperledger Fabric, the platform enables mortgage companies, banks, accounting firms, and others to safely share their customers’ PII, IP, and sensitive information with co-processing entities in compliance with GDPR, CCPA privacy regulations.

Tech Mahindra is implementing the solution for the China division of a leading global manufacturer of consumer dispensing packaging and drug delivery devices. In the current engagement, Tech Mahindra will enable the customer to classify and securely share sensitive documents within or outside the organization with the help of advanced encryption, policies and immutable audit logs that are traceable on blockchain. Our solution will make information tamper-proof, and hack-proof thereby enabling our customer to transact with integrity and confidence with all internal and external stakeholders.

Nov 18

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Hyperledger Fabric Security Threats: What to Look For

By Christopher Cordi, Software Engineer, Splunk. Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is designed to enable secure collaboration between multiple organizations operating with limited trust. Despite the security improvements Hyperledger Fabric provides, deployments still require careful configuration and monitoring to ensure that they are operating securely. In this post, we will examine different types of threats that Hyperledger Fabric operators should consider and discuss how to mitigate them.

As a permissioned blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric’s network threats differ from popular permissionless chains. For example, 51% attacks and network partitioning attacks are not as significant of a threat on permissioned networks because users are known, their activities can be monitored, and access is managed by access control lists. Some of these attacks are common to all distributed systems like Denial of Service (DoS) or consensus manipulation. Other attacks target specific components in a Hyperledger Fabric network, such as the Membership Service Provider (MSP).

Denial of Service: DoS attacks disrupt the network’s availability and are a threat to any distributed system. Many different attacks can result in denial of service, which makes it difficult to proactively prevent. This risk can be mitigated by collecting performance metrics, such as transaction throughput and latency, to detect compromised availability early on.

Consensus Manipulation: Attacks on the network consensus include DoS and transaction reordering attacks. Hyperledger Fabric currently only utilizes Crash Fault Tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms, meaning it cannot tolerate any malicious actors. There is ongoing work on Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithms, which will be able to tolerate up to ⅓ of the network being malicious. Regardless of the consensus algorithm used, early detection of malicious behavior can mitigate this threat. Logging threat indicators, such as leadership elections and transaction latencies, is critical for detection.

MSP Compromise: A compromised MSP can be a significant Fabric-specific threat. The MSP is able to modify access control to the network and, if malicious, could deny service and perform sybil attacks. The MSP may be compromised by a rogue insider or through private key theft, which may only be detectable after exploitation. To mitigate this risk, it is important to follow best practices with key management. Logging MSP actions, such as certificate creation and revocation, can help detect malicious behavior in case of compromise. Alerting based on that logging results in early identification and remediation.

Smart Contract Exploitation: While the cost of smart contract attacks is easier to quantify in cryptocurrencies, where there is measurable monetary loss, such attacks in Hyperledger Fabric can compromise business logic and network performance. In addition to ordinary programming logic bugs, common errors can also stem from inappropriately handling concurrency or nondeterminism. To mitigate this risk, smart contracts should be designed with security in mind at the onset by following a secure software development life cycle framework. Before deploying, smart contract security should be assessed with smart contract analysis tools like the Hyperledger Lab Chaincode Analyzer to detect potential risks. For more sensitive applications, consider an external security audit or formal verification. Finally, the performance and usage of the smart contract should be monitored once deployed in order to detect anomalous behavior.

Proactive measures to mitigate these security threats are only part of a secure deployment. It is just as important to continuously monitor the performance and security of the network. Many of these threats can only be detected by correlating data across the blockchain network, organization infrastructure, and threat intelligence providers. It can be a challenge to ingest and act on this large amount of diverse data, so be sure to account for scalability and analytic capabilities when securing your environment.

For more details on how to collect and act on Hyperledger Fabric data to minimize downtime, reduce the meantime to detect and respond to incidents, tune into my webinar on Hyperledger Fabric security monitoring on Wednesday, December 1, 1:00 pm EST.

Recorded video

Nov 11

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Splunk Adds Hyperledger Fabric Data Visibility into Mix, Powers New Blockchain-Based Content Management Solution for S&P Global

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric, Member Case Study

Read the full case study here.

Large organizations have always struggled to get visibility into their data. Frequently, data comes in many sources and formats while also being siloed across the organization. DLTs add ledger data and metadata to the mix.

Similarly, consortiums need to interoperate with each other. Yet organizations often use disparate tools for logs, metrics and tracing. All these are deployed on different clouds or on-prem. Then they build their own tools to take data from the ledgers and put it into a SQL database. Consortiums may include competitors who don’t trust one another, so they don’t want to share data. But, if no one shares data, it can be challenging to determine if an organization has a problem or if it lies in the network.

Splunk, a company focused on removing barriers between data and action, took on this challenge by creating open source solutions that allow the ingestion of ledger data and corresponding metadata while correlating with other data sources.

Splunk’s customers include 92 Fortune 100 companies. Meeting their needs was critical so Splunk asked a lot of questions. They learned that many customers used Hyperledger Fabric, and it was fairly straightforward to ingest that DLT data. Splunk pulls in data without caring about structure, schema, or form so there was no need to format Hyperledger Fabric data before ingestion.

The next questions were about what they could do with the Hyperledger Fabric data. Users could analyze and correlate blocks and transaction data with other data they had in Splunk. But conversations with customers revealed they wanted more, including chaincode events, metrics, and, most recently, private data collections.

Initially, Splunk focused on uses from an IT perspective. Then the focus shifted to security. Customers wanted to know what else they could do to secure their infrastructure. Keeping it up and running was important, but so was making sure nothing would compromise their Hyperledger Fabric environment

One of those interested customers was S&P Global, which delivers data, research, and credit ratings, among other things, to governments, companies, and individuals. In 2019, it was entering a new region. S&P took this opportunity to explore modern technologies and new ways of doing business. It decided to build a content management solution from scratch with innovative technology and security.

Splunk’s Hyperledger Fabric-based applications caught S&P’s attention. Leveraging the Fabric data in Splunk meant S&P could now get user interactions and metadata—like who uploaded documents or modified documents and when. S&P developed applications to retrieve that metadata and present it to the user for document searches. This opened up possibilities for providing an audit trail.

The resulting solution, S&P Global Secure Vault, is multi-cloud, multi-tenant, and secure, and it is ready to scale to multiple regions and multiple participants. In the solution, S&P uses Splunk for three primary areas. The first is infrastructure monitoring on the operations of different components. The company wants to make sure the system stays healthy and the right teams are alerted if there’s an issue. The second is visibility into the events happening within the blockchain network. And third is business activity monitoring, which includes searching for document metadata.

Hyperledger worked with Splunk and S&P Global on a case study that details this blockchain-based secure content management system and how the companies partnered to add visibility into business transactions, making them indexable and searchable. It also delves into Splunk’s commitment to open source software and plans for helping customers that use Hyperledger Fabric get even more from their data.

Read the full case study here. For more details on security monitoring of Hyperledger Fabric data, tune into the Wednesday, December 1, webinar with Christoper Cord of Splunk.

Nov 02

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A Hands-on Approach to Growing the Blockchain Talent Pool

By Igor Ioshpa, Norilsk Nickel Blog, Education, Hyperledger Fabric

One of the biggest barriers to growth for the blockchain industry is the availability of developers with the right skills and training. At Norilsk Nickel, we are tackling that problem directly with the Blockchain Master’s Program, which we launched in 2019 in partnership with MIPT and IBM.

Norilsk Nickel is constantly introducing and using advanced engineering technologies, and it is therefore logical that the company has focused its attention on blockchain technologies. In addition, working with students is one of the most important areas of the company’s activities. This has become the background for creation of a Blockchain Master’s Program in cooperation with the major technology players leading in their respective fields.

The Blockchain Master’s Program is based in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which is among the Russian technical universities regularly included in the top international rankings. MIPT is always interested in the development and implementation of educational programs in new promising areas. Educational programs at MIPT embrace numerous high-tech areas in partnership with Russian and international industrial companies.

One of the challenges in creating the Master’s Program was the fact that this was essentially the first Russian full-fledged educational program entirely dedicated to Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). The best experts in the market, from Russia and beyond, have been involved in the development of this educational course. Since all of them are practicing experts, the curriculum is updated on an ongoing basis taking into account the latest technology developments as well as business expectations. All our lecturers work in the fields they teach for leading companies, mainly in the IT sector.

The primary task of the Master’s Program is not only to educate the students but also to enable them to gain real practical experience. Therefore, it was not easy to create a balanced curriculum. We aimed to combine both theoretical and practical disciplines to provide students with the most relevant knowledge as well as skills that will assist them in pursuing a successful business or academic career.

Our Hyperledger Fabric course, a cornerstone of the curriculum, provides the students with detailed information about the modular architecture of the Hyperledger Fabric platform and its capacities for creating blockchain applications. Given the fact that Hyperledger Fabric is the de facto standard for the enterprise blockchain platforms, the study of this subject takes two full semesters. As a result of the training, students create their own Hyperledger Fabric projects helping to solve relevant application tasks.

One of Norilsk Nickel’s key education goals is supporting talented students. That’s why all applicants who have successfully passed the entrance tests can study free of charge. The Blockchain Master’s Program provides for paid internships as well, so any student who is serious about studying can get an offer as early as after the first academic semester. Meanwhile, the student can be engaged in both business projects and scientific and research activities. Norilsk Nickel, as a major industrial player, is committed to providing all interested students with the opportunity to build their career path concurrently with the study on the basis of real projects or scientific inquiries.

Over the three years of the Master’s Program existence, we have witnessed vertical growth of the number of potential applicants, which indicates the importance of having such programs. To meet the demand, we made a decision to double the intake of students this year.

We have also revised and adjusted the curriculum to make the program as relevant as possible, based on the development of technologies and the requests formed by the business environment.

We actively participate in various events both within and outside MIPT to demonstrate our expertise in blockchain technology. Such events enable the students and the IT community to understand the relevance and importance of this technology and help us to make it more understandable for a wider audience.

To grow the Blockchain Master’s Program further, we plan to strengthen the level of scientific research to compete with top technical academic institutions around the world. We already have reached some preliminary agreements for this expanded focus.

For more information about the program, please visit website https://blockchain.mipt.ru/en.

Cover image: Pxfuel

Oct 28

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A Look at Hyperledger-Powered Financial Services Solutions in Action

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Firefly

It is #HyperledgerFinTech month, so we are spotlighting solutions where Hyperledger is at work across the finance service market. Read on for details on applications and solutions leveraging a mix of Hyperledger technologies to invent and reinvent a range of services, including eKYC, insurance claims processing, accounts reconciliation, specialty trades and more:

AnaMeen

AnaMeen is a multi-organizational eKYC solution from Ahli Fintech involving Jordan Ahli Bank and Zain Jordan, a mobile telecom provider. This eKYC-as-a-Service, built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform (OBP), aims to remove the friction in the current KYC and onboarding process challenges faced by all banks and financial institutions and to provide greater financial inclusion for all Jordanians. It delivers an enhanced and secure customer experience, with a 10-day account opening process now made instantaneous. Ahli Fintech leverages augmented intelligence and deep learning technologies to verify the identity of the AnaMeen users’ government-issued identity documents. It collects the four-signature specimens of the users and verifies the client signature on file during a verification video-call with an AnaMeen agent. Customers verify their information and their identity is matched based on their facial biometrics during the video-call. Each customer’s identity is uploaded to a smart contract on OBP to verify and endorse it, storing it in the “Meen World” immutable ledger distributed across the permissioned blockchain network. The solution, which is powered Hyperledger Fabric, enables self-sovereign instant KYC data sharing, with full control in the users’ hands in full compliance with international data protection and data privacy standards. It is accessible via the “Meen World” eKYC-as-a-Service partner portal, where entities can request access and users can grant access in order to use the services provided by these entities, including instant digital onboarding with subscribed banks.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative is the risk management and insurance industry’s first enterprise-level blockchain consortium that brings together experts and developers to advance insurance-specific use cases via Canopy 3.0, a custom blockchain architecture running on Kaleido that leverages Hyperledger FireFly.

A major source of inefficiency in the life & annuity insurance industry is that life insurers lack a single source of truth for processing death benefits and claims. For all participants, the multiple handoffs between systems and people increase time, cost, and risk.

The Mortality Monitor project, a blockchain-based technology solution led by RiskStream Collaborative, offers a single source of digital decedent information required to process a claim. Instant notification helps carriers proactively identify potential deaths more quickly, reducing the burden on the beneficiary, and shortening the cycle time.

NPLUS

Sydema has implemented NPLUS, a digital and independent platform that makes the exchange of non-performing loans (NPLs) simple, reliable and secure. This transaction platform provides an exchange where banks and investors can trade NPLs based on standardized data templates, which helps to increase transparency and liquidity in this process. It also reduces the wide bid-ask spreads on NPLs, thus contributing to a faster clean-up of bank balance sheets. NPLUS uses an independent blockchain solution developed by Mangrovia on the Hyperledger Fabric-based Oracle Blockchain Platform so that the tracking and storage of loan portfolio and collateral data is referenceable on the marketplace and NPL trading operations are transparent and persistent.

Public Mint

Public Mint is the first fiat-native public blockchain that allows people, companies, applications and banks to interact in frictionless new ways around money. Prior to Public Mint, transactions required banking and exchange off-ramps, meaning there was no such solution offered by payment providers that was blockchain compatible or that enabled instant settlement in fiat. Public Mint, which is built on Hyperledger Besu, is an open blockchain blended with an API platform that allows fiat money to get all the benefits of a cryptocurrency, minus the volatility and complexity. People and businesses from all over the world are free to build all kinds of fiat-based applications and services on top of Public Mint, fueled by money as we know it – without the limitations of traditional banking rails.

SECURUS

Supermoney has introduced SECURUS, a specialist insurance product that addresses key issues in insurance accounts reconciliation between the customers, brokers, insurer, and re-insurers. It is an end-to-end finance and accounts reconciliation solution incorporating underwriting and claims functions. Using tokenization to create and manage accounting of real-world payment flows across multiple siloed systems, the Oracle Blockchain Platform-based network covers MGAs, brokers, and underwriters. It enables ingestion of data from multiple systems, provides Bordereau reports on money flows related to premiums paid or claims with real-time updates, and partner contracts, including commission rates. Built with Hyperledger Fabric at its core, SECURUS significantly reduces the effort and cost of manual reconciliation and avoids human errors or fraud impacting regulatory compliance, reinsurance accounting and profitability.

Symbridge

Symbridge is a blockchain-based digital asset exchange for institutional and accredited investors. Built on Hyperledger Fabric’s open-source protocol, Symbridge’s advanced technology leverages the enhanced security, immutability, and externally-verifiable state integrity of blockchain and combines it with a high-performance trading environment. The core advantages are better transparency, tighter security, greater accuracy, reduced cost and more efficient trading. Building on Hyperledger Fabric allows Symbridge to have a decentralized validation network without sacrificing performance. Learn more about our validation network powered by Hyperledger Fabric.

TradeAssets

TradeAssets is a digital platform for banks that automates the process of trade finance risk origination and distribution. It enables institutions to buy and sell bank risk assets while retaining some of the bilateral aspects of their current process. KrypC has helped TradeAssets implement a Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain in its online portal for securing assets. The portal is now live and provides a single point of access for the sale and purchase of assets. Banks can communicate to a large ecosystem of connected institutions to efficiently match the appetite of sellers with buyers. The entire process is quick and convenient, and all communications are secured through the portal.

TradeAssets provides robust security, complete transparency, and immutable trust and consensus between all parties.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the financial service market with #HyperledgerFinTech this month on social channels. Or get involved with the Capital Markets or Trade Finance Special Interest Groups.

Cover image by Bicanski on Pixnio

Oct 24

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Managing a Modern Cityscape: How Tech Mahindra Digitized the Land Registry for Abu Dhabi with Hyperledger Fabric

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Member Case Study

Read the full case study here.

Abu Dhabi is one of the richest cities in the world, boasting modern architectural wonders from the first circular skyscraper to the dramatic Etihad towers to the world’s farthest leaning tower. This 375 square mile cityscape is a modern marvel, and managing it requires extensive real estate transactions and records.

Starting from selling a piece of land to constructing a building or residential complex to selling the units to managing tenancy, there are a multitude of steps involved in creating a land deed record and the process can span up to six years to complete. So when Abu Dhabi City Municipality (ADM) set out to digitize processes for the Department of Urban Planning & Municipalities, they made the land registry the starting point.

With its experience in building enhanced blockchain-based, customer-centric systems within its public sector practice, Tech Mahindra was tapped to bring the city’s paper-based real estate records into the modern era.

To create an end-to-end solution that utilizes automated transactions for sharing and viewing deeds, the Tech Mahindra team knew blockchain technology would play a major role in Abu Dhabi’s digital transformation. With the help of Smart Dubai, the government organization facilitating Dubai’s citywide smart transformation, and the Dubai Future Foundation, a government organization focused on blockchain, Tech Mahindra compared various distributed ledger technologies that could scale to match the multi-tenant and growing needs of the ADM’s complex land registry. In the end, the team selected Hyperledger Fabric.

With the new digitized registry, stakeholders can trust that they are working with the most current and validated information because of blockchain’s smart contracts and immutable records, which also eliminate the susceptibility to lost or stolen documents or fraud. While all members on the blockchain can interact with one another and access the same documents on the ledger, each member can also establish a separate, private relationship with another in-network entity and maintain transactional isolation through Hyperledger Fabric’s channels feature.

This solution is deployed using the multi-tier architecture ADM’s Smart Hub, a web-based application that the city’s citizens already use to electronically perform various municipal activities such as reserving a spot in a parking lot, acquiring permits to public spaces for gatherings, or paying bills. Launching on Smart Hub eliminated the need to educate and onboard the public on a new platform and allowed Tech Mahindra to put more attention towards the back-end infrastructure.

Hyperledger worked up with Tech Mahindra on a case study that details the back-end work, including both the business flow and system architecture, supporting this solution as well as plans for expanding it to support wider digitization of government services.

Read the full case study here.

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