As Russia slowly emerges from a lengthy recession in the wake of collapsing energy prices, the Moscow Stock Exchange may have discovered a secret weapon in recruiting international investors – blockchain.
In spite of double-digit returns to investors between 2005 and 2010, and a current pump in Russian investment credited to US President Donald Trump’s “cheerleading” of the nation, relics of cold-war fears persist among many investors.
So much work is being done every day by the technical community to improve Hyperledger’s projects. We thought it be interesting to visualize the software development based on the commit history in git. Below, you’ll find videos of two of Hyperledger’s framework projects: Sawtooth and Fabric.
Starting with Hyperledger Sawtooth, you can see the project evolve during the 2016 POCs. As we reach fall we are able to open source a lot of that POC code and you see an explosion of new code around September.
Through these usage trials we learned what of the initial design was sound and what needed changes. During early winter you see the new design get built out. Once that matured around January you see where we removed the legacy code from the master branch and a chunk of the tree vanishes. This is the point where App / Dapp developers started using the new Sawtooth 0.8 API.
We are now at a point of interface stability which is one of the key triggers for declaring a Sawtooth v1.0 release. SDKs are available for a variety of languages (go, c++, java, node, python,… ) using it. There are more things we want to do before declaring 1.0 but the API for writing business logic is substantially simplified.
As for Hyperledger Fabric, there are 23 companies and a bunch of individuals (27 without an affiliation in their email signature) represented and 130 developers in total that have contributed to Hyperledger Fabric thus far. Top companies by contribution are: IBM, State Street Bank, Digital Asset Holdings, IT People, Linux Foundation, DTCC, Hitachi, Wanda Group, Fujitsu, Hyperchain, and Huawei Technologies.
There’s been a huge amount of work delivering the architectural refactor since the Fabric v0.6 release last fall, including a new approach to consensus, chaincode lifecycle management, support for pluggable membership services providers, multi-channel support, a redesigned ledger, pluggable database support and so much more.
You might want to join the other engineers working on these or one of the other Hyperledger projects! You can plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.
Northern Trust is preparing for more advanced applications of its blockchain platform.
After launching possibly the first fully functioning blockchain for trading private equities in February, the Chicago-based bank with $6.7tn assets under custody is now in the process of scaling up its work
SWIFT, the operator of the platform used by the global interbanking system, has revealed details of its blockchain proof-of-concept (PoC) trial that sees participation from a number of global banks for real-time cross-border payments.
As our incubated projects continue to mature, we’d like to update the community monthly on the progress we make. Below are updates on Blockchain Explorer, Fabric, Cello, Iroha and Sawtooth Lake during April. An update on Burrow will be included in May’s blog.
Hyperledger Blockchain Explorer
We are actively working towards implementing Explorer as per the architecture document. We are planning to make the initial release compatible with Hyperledger Fabric v1.0.
Hyperledger Fabric
The v1.0.0-alpha release was published just prior to the previous Governing Board meeting. The past month has been focused on planning out the end-game for the v1.0 release – including deciding how we will manage the process, and what remaining feature work must be included
We have also been working on cleaning up JIRA, so that we can focus on a truly JIRA-centric process of managing releases going forward to close out v1.0 and beyond
There have been improvements made to the bootstrap process to enable deployment on Windows and in documenting some sample applications.
Hyperledger Cello
Fixed the build-up problem on MacOS, now we support both linux and MacOS to run Hyperledger Cello
Add host operation fill up/clean/reset supported in dashboard with react theme
New sub-project Cello-analytics was started to help maintain those operational/analytics tools
Intern candidates on Hyperledger Cello are under review to select
Updated the design and contribution documentation
Connected with Cloudsoft to have a online demo to make decision to collaborate on the project
Iroha-Ametsuchi (https://github.com/hyperledger/iroha-ametsuchi) is almost finished. The integration with Hyperledger Iroha will be finished shortly, once we finish fixing bugs in the flatbuffers code.
Hyperledger Sawtooth
Hyperledger Sawtooth is on track to release v1.0 mid-summer.
Recommended version and default docs upgraded to 0.8. 0.7 is now considered legacy. Once 0.8 is feature-complete and passing various quality criteria it will be promoted to 1.0.
Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) migrated to 0.8 architecture.
Validator Registry migrated to 0.8
Added trusted validator signup on genesis tool
Created deb-only docker images for all components
Migrated load generator from 0.7/stable to 0.8/master
Implemented ZMQ ‘Ironhouse’ security on interconnect
Added support for parallel scheduler to context manager
Added several REST API features
Completed the Completer which aids peering by accounting for locally missing blocks and batches
Completed a number of CLI tools which benefit on-chain settings
Gossip improvements
That’s it for the updates! We encourage developers to join our efforts on these projects. You can plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.
The global payment relay network SWIFT has announced it will use Hyperledger as a basis for simplifying international transactions.
In a trial together with Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon and others, SWIFT will seek to use the Blockchain to update its practices in an ever-evolving cross-border payments market.
The National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing and the IBM Center for Blockchain Innovation (ICBI) are collaborating to jointly develop a module on financial technology, to better equip students with essential knowledge and skill sets in this area.
IBM and the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing have entered a joint collaboration project to develop a teaching module on distributed ledger technologies.
The module, developed by IBM’s research arm Center for Blockchain Innovation (ICBI) is being designed to better equip students with essential knowledge and skill sets in the topic.
The mass uptake of this technology could be drawing closer as six global correspondent banks are set to engage in a Swift blockchain trial.
The goal of this project is to ascertain whether distributed ledger technology is up to the challenge of helping banks to manage funds held in overseas accounts. Bank messaging network Swift has collected the participants as part of a global payments innovation (gpi) plan.