Hyperledger Fabric

Turning retired planes onto business opportunity, Honeywell Aerospace is on track to modernize the $4 billion used aircraft parts market. A key part of the formula for success has been deploying Hyperledger Fabric to bring a layer of trust to the online sales process. 

When a plane retires, operators can harvest valuable parts, especially engines and landing gear. And those parts can be sold, recertified as airworthy, and reused in other planes. There is a big demand for the parts but, since aviation is a heavily regulated industry, sales require certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies. Each part must be documented with a complete history of its ownership, use, and repairs. Needless to say, tracking all the information required on all those parts is a challenging, error-prone process. And any uncertified or counterfeit part that snuck into the supply chain could have dire consequences.

Vendors attempting online sales were putting up sites that looked a lot like Craigslist, only with no prices or images. Only the most basic information, such as a part’s condition, was posted online with the seller’s phone number. Any transaction required extensive back and forth between buyer and seller to fill in each part’s history and details. It was a long way from the ecommerce experience we’ve all come to expect and online sales made up less than 2.5% of all transactions. The Honeywell Aerospace team knew they had to do better and that the key was building in a layer of trust.

Ushing in a new era in used airplane parts sales, Honeywell created a blockchain-based marketplace, GoDirect Trade, that is a modern shopping site that gives buyers easy access to the information and parts they needed and, importantly, removed uncertainty from the transactions.

Thanks to the blockchain records, buyers can now view vital data on many parts, such as:

• The entire lifecycle of a part
• The number of hours it was in service
• Any and all repairs made and by who, when and where
• All previous owners of the part

In selecting the blockchain framework to power GoDirect Trade, Honeywell had a number of criteria, including low latency, high throughput, and fast send rates. Hyperledger Fabric provided all that, along with privacy controls such as channels that give a granular ability to manage data. 

Today, shopping on the platform feels like using a typical consumer e-commerce site with photos, detailed product information, and a simple checkout. The average checkout screen only takes two clicks. All these were groundbreaking innovations for aviation parts.   

A month after GoDirect Trade went live with little fanfare, the marketplace had registered more than 300 buyers and processed nearly a quarter million dollars in online transactions. Within 10 weeks, sales soared past $1 million.

Hyperledger has captured the details behind the conception and development of the Hyperledger Fabric-powered GoDirect Trade, its success to date and future plans for the platform. Read the full case study here.

Hyperledger Certifications give experts a professional edge by providing globally recognized evidence of skills mastery, demonstrating ability within a specific topic. 

Hyperledger announced the Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA) designation earlier this year. This certification is earned by professionals who can effectively build a secure Hyperledger Fabric network for commercial deployment, including the ability to install, configure, operate, manage and troubleshoot the nodes of thatnetwork¹.

Hyperledger expanded the available certifications with the recently announced Hyperledger Certified Service Provider (HCSP) designation for companies that meet the following criteria: 

1. Be a member of Hyperledger, 
2. Have a business model to support enterprise end users, including putting engineers at customer sites, and
3. Have three or more engineers who have passed the Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA) exam.

As an active member of Hyperledger, contributing to the quarterly releases and participating in conferences around the world, Chainyard has the first requirement covered. Additionally, Chainyard’s business model, covering the second requirement, is to service enterprises, startups and associations with their blockchain needs, whether they be advisory, engineering, operational or governance in nature. 

Regarding the third, I am proud to say our first three engineers who obtained the CHFA designation are Ratnakar Asara, Surya Lanka and Ramesh Thoomu. All three were motivated to get the designation to validate their expertise and contribute to the company’s goal of obtaining the HCSP designation. 

Obtaining this designation is important to individuals both to affirm what they know and for their personal development and growth. Here is what our first three engineers to obtain the HCFA designation had to say. 

Achieving Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA) is a big milestone in my career and demonstrates my skills, knowledge and competencies to build a secure Hyperledger Fabric network for commercial deployment including the ability to install, configure, operate, manage, and troubleshoot the nodes on that network. 

Working in multiple blockchain projects through Chainyard gave me opportunity in exploring Hyperledger Fabric in depth and boosted my confidence in taking this exam. 

– Ratnakar Asara 

CHFA is highly recommended because it helps one to understand the core Hyperledger Fabric network fundamentals with emphasis on building Hyperledger Fabric network, operations and maintenance. It also helps organizations to build Hyperledger Fabric blockchain skill sets for its employees. 

Phenomenal efforts have been put forward by the Hyperledger team in designing the content of CHFA. Thanks to the Linux Foundation. 

– Ramesh Thoomu 

“I have been working with Hyperledger Fabric for over two years. When I heard about the opportunity to become Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator, I made up mind to do it. I am grateful to Chainyard for their trust and encouragement to become Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator.” 

– Surya Lanka 

For our company, the designation separates us from the competition and provides an objective affirmation by a respected organization, the Linux Foundation, of our capabilities with Hyperledger Fabric. 

Our team has worked on many Hyperledger Fabric projects running in multiple data centers and public clouds on projects across many domains. The experience the team has obtained over the past four years is tremendous and enabled Ratnakar, Ramesh and Surya to pass the exam. Their dedication to their craft, careers and our clients, helping them to solve many problems, allowed them to pass this exam and validate their expertise with Hyperledger Fabric. 

We are happy to say we have additional engineers in the pipeline who have committed to work towards this designation. We work closely on our client projects, leveraging each other’s strengths, to deliver the best work. This collaboration will continue into the classroom as our expert level engineers have promised to hold extra whiteboard coaching sessions to help others in the company pass the HCFA exam. We look forward to having more engineers achieve this milestone. 

As a company, we see the Hyperledger Certified Service Provider designation as a way to help better promote our company services and grow our business. Having the designation validates what we say to our clients, giving them greater confidence in our team, whether it be during pre-sales, while developing a solution or when resolving an operational issue. 

Chainyard has been active with Hyperledger for four years and proud to have the HCSP designation to reinforce our commitment to the ecosystem.

^{1. Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA) requirements}

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

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.