Hyperledger Iroha Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Jun 30

#HyperledgerPayments: Applications Making Financial Transactions Easier, Faster and More Accessible

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Bitcoin, Ethereum and other altcoins have sparked a range of investments, industries and even emotions. However, there is a fast-growing array of digital currencies and electronic payment systems that are focused specifically on leveraging distributed ledger technologies to make fundamental financial transactions easier, faster and more accessible both at the wholesale and retail level. As this recently released ebook details, central banks around the world are exploring ways to leverage different Hyperledger DLTs to introduce Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). However, there is #HyperledgerPayments action happening on a number of fronts and leveraging a mix of Hyperledger technologies.

Below, we highlight a few of the Hyperledger-based applications that are already in the market, rewriting the rules for how money and value are delivered, stored and spent. This sampling showcases the global reach of both Hyperledger technologies and blockchain payment systems:

Bakong

Sponsored by the National Bank of Cambodia, the country’s central bank, Bakong is the first retail payments system in the world using blockchain technology. Built on Hyperledger Iroha, Bakong delivers value for customers, merchants and banks. Individuals can now transfer money and buy from merchants with a simple smartphone app. Merchants gain a fast, cashless, and secure payments system. And banks can do interbank transfers at much lower cost.

Bakong was developed by Soramitsu and, after a soft launch in 2019, now has nearly 40 financial institutions (and counting) using the system. The project was also designed to promote financial inclusion for the country’s large number of unbanked citizens. Any citizen of the country can open a Bakong account, even if they don’t have a traditional bank account. The more than 500 merchants that accept Bakong can be viewed in a map inside

Byacco

Soramitsu also created a local payment system for the University of Aizu, Japan, based on Hyperledger Iroha – technology that was originally developed within the walls of the University. Byacco is an app that students use to add and access digital money to pay local goods and services, split bills at the university cafeteria and stationary shop and send and receive money with a low (1 ¥) fee.

Kate Coin

KBC bank in Belgium has introduced blockchain-based Kate Coin to customers using its KBC Mobile app. Powered by Hyperledger Fabric, Kate Coins are issued to customers as loyalty rewards. To start, the Kate Coins can be used to pay for banking and insurance services. However, the goal is to scale up its use through partnerships with business customers and other third parties that want to reach KBC Mobile app users, first in Belgium and then across the HBC group.

Twig

To help drive the circular economy, UK-based Twig has created a system that allows consumers to turn their pre-owned electronics, clothes and other goods into cash. Users are paid for their goods via Hyperledger Sawtooth-based Twig Pay, where they can see incoming payments and tap into the cash for purchases and transfers.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the financial service market with #HyperledgerPayments on social channels. For a deeper dive, join us at Hyperledger Global Forum 2022, September 12-14 in Dublin, Ireland. Sessions will include:

A Hyperledger Fabric-based Programmable Money Platform – Robert van Donge, IntellectEU & Dirk Hermans, KBC Group

Hosted Discussion: Private Credit on Blockchain – Anshuman Asthana, Marketnode

Saudi Aramco, Procure to Pay Eco-System – Ali Safri, Avanza Innovations & Abdullah M Askari, Saudi Aramco

US Digital Currency: Opportunities, Challenges and Strategies – Jim Mason, DTCC

Hands-on-Workshop: Moving Central Bank Digital Currency from Conception to Reality with Hyperledger Technologies – Elli Androulaki & Angelo De Caro, IBM

Cover photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

May 19

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New Long-Term Support Version of Hyperledger Iroha Creates On-Ramp for v2 Adoption

By Hyperledger Iroha Team Blog, Hyperledger Iroha

In 2016, a team at SORAMITSU envisioned a universal blockchain framework. They began work on Iroha with the aim of creating a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform that would be user-friendly, yet robust enough to work with various use cases in any industry, while providing complete client libraries, simple architecture, and easy-to-comprehend entities. In short, Iroha is both a framework and a poem that became a Japanese syllabary, ordered and beautiful.

In the six years that have passed, Iroha was contributed to the Hyperledger Foundation, and the project has evolved immensely. When Hyperledger Iroha v1 was released, it was with the goal of being a flexible private blockchain ledger and to help flatten the DLT learning curve. Hyperledger Iroha v1 was to be like digital epoxy, moldable into whatever was needed, but once solidified — rock solid and reliable. The project was a resounding success, achieving what was originally planned and far beyond.

Hyperledger Iroha v1, which graduated as a project in 2019, is both a marvel of performance, speed, and reliability; as well as a platform for mentorship and learning. To this day, Iroha v1 and its SDKs are known as some of the cleanest code bases.

Introducing Hyperledger Iroha V2

The world of technology flows extremely fast, and by the time everybody talks about an idea, it’s already too late to implement it. “In our world, who can stay gold forever?” as the second line of the Iroha poem states. The Hyperledger Iroha community has taken a forward-looking stance with the successor to Iroha v1. We anticipate what the world of tomorrow will need in a blockchain ledger. We intend to be the “the great mountain of Uwi,” of which the third line of the same poem speaks, accumulating the Karma of human beings and moving beyond it.

We thus proudly present to you a sneak peek at Hyperledger Iroha v2.

Hyperledger Iroha 2’s main goal is to embody the ideal of Kaizen: eliminate the excessive, preserve the unambiguously good. Iroha 2 is designed as a modular system that’s easy to reason about. You can deploy it as a toll-free intermediate ledger in a Hyperledger Cactus consortium, or you can use it as a standalone ledger with transaction fees. It can just as easily connect to parity Substrate networks and provide Byzantine fault-tolerant governance. But Iroha doesn’t need to be cumbersome. It only asks you questions when no reasonable default can be assumed. It can be as simple and as complex as you choose to make it.

The second iteration of Hyperledger Iroha is close to being production-ready, but far from feature complete. It comes with its own bespoke execution model that can be optimized for parallel execution, something which few, if any, ledgers currently allow. Both elastic-supply currencies as well as NFTs are supported, and accounts are allowed to be identified both as a familiar name@domain as well as a verbose but cryptic SS58 address.

Another goal of Hyperledger Iroha 2 is to become the blockchain that would be more than capable of working with a greater variety of use cases while still being lightweight and easy to use. Iroha 2 has been developed in Rust, and will allow blockchain developers to connect to public networks, to Substrate networks; to collect or not collect transaction fees; to choose what assets to mint and how to use them.

In short, with Hyperledger Iroha 2 it is possible to build the type of network that would work best for you: be it a simplistic network that will only allow to create and transfer simple assets, or an elaborate system with reputation, connection to public networks, offline transactions, and complex assets.

Join the Hyperledger Iroha v2 Community

You can try out Hyperledger Iroha 2 right now, with the help of our Tutorial, which is still a work in progress, but already shows you many features of Iroha 2; such as the creation of basic systems, Iroha Special Instruction or WASM events, as well as usage of Iroha through different languages such as Java, Rust, JavaScript, Python 3 or simply through a CLI.

Now Hyperledger Iroha 2 is hitting a major milestone. We are releasing the 5th preview-release, which will be supported for the following six months. This will allow developers to start using Iroha 2 to design their products and get a preview of some of the innovative functions that are coming soon.

Monthly preview-releases have been available since January 2022. The May 2022 release is different, though. The long-term support provided to this particular version is intended for early adopters to build up their projects. We shall, of course, forge ahead and break things, but the preview release № 5 will remain unchanged (save for security and bug fixes) for at least half a year. In addition to the main peer binary (written in Rust), we will also release the accompanying JavaScript, Kotlin and Java SDKs so that any complex projects that require a stable base can be built.

Our ongoing goal is to keep growing the community – and as always, everyone is welcome at our bi-weekly meetings and in our dedicated Discord chat; especially anyone who wants to build the best blockchain technology with us, and anyone who would like to use it. Every contribution idea will be considered. Let us work together on the future of Hyperledger Iroha!

Dec 21

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#HyperledgerSocialImpact: Highlighting Hyperledger-powered solutions driving change

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha

There’s no better time of year to reflect on the power of technology to improve lives so we are celebrating #HyperledgerSocialImpact month. Organizations of all sizes and types are levering Hyperledger technologies to power solutions that are driving real change. The impact ranges from boosting financial inclusion to tackling climate change and sustainable and equitable business practices to increasing access to healthcare, education and more

Read on for just a sampling of the solutions powered by Hyperledger technologies that at work for the greater good.

Bakong (and beyond): CBDC payment data for credit underwriting in emerging economies

Access to credit is crucial for micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to share in growth, especially in emerging economies. However, they often lack the records needed to verify creditworthiness. Hyperledger contributor SORAMITSU has learned firsthand the challenges faced by emerging-market MSMEs and lending institutions alike through its work on Bakong, the National Bank of Cambodia’s blockchain-based digital currency and payment infrastructure.

As a finalist in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Global CBDC Challenge, SORAMITSU designed an app capable of querying payment data relevant to credit underwriting. The app is designed for Bakong—which is built using Hyperledger Iroha—but could overlay any DLT-based payment system. Lenders could use the app to query data that are relevant to a given wallet’s creditworthiness, such as payments volume, regularity and geographical area of incoming and outgoing payments, and monthly average balance. Importantly, the app only allows queries to be designed in Boolean (true/false) format, and requires approval (a cryptographic signature) from the wallet being queried. By allowing lenders to query wallets under strict conditions of data minimization and informed consent, the application enables accurate underwriting, while mitigating the risk of data monopolization and threats to privacy. SORAMITSU will draw on the lessons learned in the MAS Challenge throughout its work on CBDC apps and functions targeting social impact worldwide—including in its new cooperation with the central bank of Laos.

Circulor: Transparency for conflict and critical minerals sourcing in the electronics and electric vehicle supply chain

Demand for raw materials such as cobalt, tantalum, and tungsten, which are critical to electronics and electric vehicle battery manufacturing, grows exponentially. Large quantities of these minerals come from Central Africa, where human rights organizations report extremely bad working conditions and cases of child labor. In 2014, UNICEF reported that there were as many as 40,000 child miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone. Amnesty International, meanwhile, reports that the cobalt industry is rampant with illegal and unethical practices. This results in increased pressure on manufacturers to ensure the ethical sourcing of their raw materials and full visibility into their supply chains. Leveraging Hyperledger Fabric and the Oracle Blockchain Platform, Circulor builds solutions to track minerals provenance and CO2 emissions and also improve efficiency in complex global supply chains. EV manufacturers like Volvo, Polestar, Mercedes-Benz and others who’ve committed to ethical sourcing utilize Circulor’s solution to track vital information about the authenticity and sourcing of raw materials—from mining and refining to actual use in battery units of the cars rolling off the assembly line.

INDETAIL: Socially conscious projects on the foundation of blockchain networks

INDETAIL, based in the Japanese city of Sapporo, is spearheading the global development of blockchain distributed ledger networks, working with investment-worthy partners on innovative, socially conscious projects. Among INDETAIL’s projects leveraging the Hyperledger Fabric-based Oracle Blockchain Platform are a token-based electric transportation system for seniors; a joint effort with Hokkaido Electric Power on electric vehicle charging stations in rural areas; an automated multilingual smart check-in service “maneKEY” for accommodation facilities; and the Riso Card, a digital wallet that supports online currencies and enables fingerprint identification.

Jyoti – Fair Works: Blockchain tech to help keep “fair fashion” in style

Jyoti – Fair Works is leveraging a Hyperledger Fabric-powered solution to give customers a view into its humanitarian supply chain. From its start, the company has made supply chain transparency part of its fair fashion brand. However, as demand has grown in recent years, Jyoti – Fair Works found its downstream supplier network was difficult to track. To maintain that transparency and to better explain it to the company’s customers, Jyoti – Fair Works has started using a blockchain application built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform by retraced, a participant in the Oracle for Startups program. By mapping its supply chain data—including certified details about the cotton growers, textile manufacturers, fabric dyers, designers, and seamstresses—in retraced’s application, Jyoti – Fair Works can update order, delivery, and production schedules and then create, print, and affix QR codes to both physical and digital garment tags.

KrypC Environmental Footprint Tracker: Showing consumers each bottles carbon and water footprint

KrypC has partnered with Heineken for a pilot blockchain program to show consumers each bottles’ carbon and water footprint. Imagine finding out the environmental footprint of your beer bottle by just one click! Hyperledger Fabric helped make this realistic by tackling the challenge of realizing full transparency over the hundreds of thousands of farmers in Heineken’s global supply chain. Consumers through this pilot were able to scan their bottle and view its actual journey as well as its environmental impact.

Oceanworks and Keep Sea Blue: Traceability of recycled plastics used in making consumer and industrial goods

Powered by Oracle Blockchain technology based on Hyperledger Fabric, Oceanworks and Keep Sea Blue provide traceability platforms and certifications that are used to encourage effective plastic waste collections from oceans and beaches, linked to sustainable reuse and certification of products made from the recycled materials. Oceanworks uses Oracle’s Intelligent Track & Trace SaaS application, and Keep Sea Blue uses a custom application built directly on the blockchain platform. Both companies have implemented monitoring processes that connect the plastics value chain—collectors, recyclers, manufacturers, brand owners—to track the journey of plastic waste, creating a transparent digital audit trail of the recycled material, and ensuring end-to-end recycled product transparency and traceability.

Symbridge: Building a market of trust

Envision this: A marketplace where there is trust and transparency. For a free market to operate truly efficiently, transparency is a vital ingredient. Transparency and trust are becoming increasingly important to investors who demand ready access to information, having been taken advantage of too many times or been shocked by headlines that have impacted their portfolio or their expectations for doing business with a company. In an industry like crypto where the market remains highly volatile, regulators are rightfully concerned for the consumer in being able to understand all risks involved.

Symbridge is the first of its kind digital asset exchange looking to change this. Built on the fundamentals of trust, innovation, and transparency, Symbridge combines all the security, efficiency, transparency, and accuracy of a decentralized exchange with the high-frequency and low-latency trading of traditional exchanges. Licensed in the United States, the Symbridge validation network, which was built using Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, solves for these issues and helps to build a market of trust. All transactions that have taken place on the blockchain are visible to users of Symbridge’s blockchain explorer, allowing for full auditability. This creates a scenario in which investors can feel confident they are aligned with a company that shares their values and is willing to promote further positive impacts across the industry.

Join the conversation using #HyperledgerSocialImpact on social channels. Or get involved with the Social Impact Special Interest Group.

Cover photo by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

Dec 09

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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Extend Hyperledger Iroha Queries with Optional Arguments

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Iroha, 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	Extend Hyperledger Iroha Queries with Optional Arguments
Description	To extend Hyperledger Iroha queries with optional arguments.
Status	COMPLETED
Difficulty	MEDIUM
Additional Details	Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Piotr Pawłowski

AGH University of
Science and Technology

“Participating in the Hyperledger Mentorship Program was an interesting adventure. It gave me knowledge of many things: internal operations of the open source community, architecture of Iroha blockchain, working with protobufs and many more technical details. But it was also great dose of knowledge about my soft skills. By working with the Hyperledger Iroha code, I managed to get my first work, but also I learned about many academic opportunities connected with the Hyperledger community. My mentor, Mr. Grzegorz Bazior, was great help in planning and organizing things. His experience and broad view made exploring solutions easier and let me add some extras to my project.”

Mentor

Grzegorz Bazior

Yonix Digital Systems

AGH University of Science and Technology

“I was invited to be a Hyperledger Iroha maintainer five months ago and then I was asked to be mentor. It was my first time being mentor of an open source project. I work as academic teacher, so I’m used to observing students learning and making progress. Being a mentor is different – we can observe progress of useful practical project from beginning until end. It takes time, but it is worth of all that effort when the project is finally completed and is great quality work.

Piotr is a student who was attending my lessons at the university where I teach. I saw that he was using many things he has learned from me at the university. He was making all the changes much faster then the mentorship plan called for. What is more, after finishing everything, he started work on another mentorship project. He learned how to work together with the community as well as with multiple technologies and completed all his work. It was a great experience and pleasure to be Piotr’s mentor.”

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.

Nov 30

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#HyperledgerAsia: Hyperledger-powered production solutions making an impact across Asia now

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Enterprise blockchain has a global reach, and Hyperledger has a very active and innovative international community. This month, we are spotlighting solutions members have put into production through Asia that are transforming everything from digital payments and bond exchanges to supply chain, telecom, healthcare and security systems.

Read on for details about a range of #HyperledgerAsia solutions that are making an impact in markets across Asia now:

Bakong

National Bank of Cambodia officially launched Bakong — a multi-stakeholder system that enables instant and final transactions using digital Cambodian Riel (KHR) or United States Dollars (USD). Co-developed by the National Bank of Cambodia and Japanese/Swiss fintech company SORAMITSU based on Hyperledger Iroha, it is built to handle the needs of numerous banks and 17 million consumers.

BondEvalue BondbloX Bond Exchange

BondEvalue has been approved as a Recognised Market Operator (RMO) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It operates BondbloX Bond Exchange (BBX), the world’s first blockchain-based bond exchange to bring trading of a wide range of fixed-income securities to the mass market across the region.

BondEvalue officially graduated from the MAS’ regulatory sandbox on October 1, 2020. The move means that BondEvalue has successfully concluded proof of technology and business model. It is now no longer bound by restrictions such as limits on trading volume and disclosures specific to the sandbox model.

BBX allows for bonds to be traded in smaller sizes of US$1,000 unlike typical bond trades of at least US$200,000. 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.

dltledgers’ “plug-and-play” platform for cross-border trade and supply chain digitization

The current trade finance system is in dire need of an upgrade. Today’s operations between all involved parties are complex, costly, labor intensive, and inefficient. Also, in the aftermath of the global pandemic, it has become even more critical to shift entirely from a paper-heavy, manual business to digital.

dltledgers used Hyperledger Fabric to create the world’s leading “plug-and-play” platform for cross-border trade and supply chain digitization. All parties’ digital trades in the supply chain are recorded on the platform, providing banks the ability to go paperless and process payments seamlessly for LC issuance and trade finance quickly.

Currently, #dltledgers processes $100 – $150 million in trade finance per month, involving about 400 traders in which 20+ are large enterprises. About 45+ banks have joined the network to facilitate trade financing with prominent names such as ANZ, ADCB, DBS and TDB. To date, #dltledgers has processed more than S$3.2 billion in trade finance via its blockchain platform.

Hala System’s Sentry

Hala Systems is using Hyperledger Fabric alongside Hedera as part of its Sentry early warning system, which helps protect 2M+ people in Syria. Hala Systems uses both Hyperledger Fabric and Hedera to manage the metadata of user inputted and created media produced in conflict. The hashed metadata is simultaneously written to a private blockchain built on an IBM Blockchain Platform powered by Hyperledger Fabric and to Hedera Consensus Service. Hala Systems uses the IBM Blockchain Platform to act as its internal repository, preserving additional metadata to augment the auditable hash data sent to Hedera Consensus Service. With these two sets of records, any 3rd party can verify the information on the public ledger to match the image and, if necessary, its accompanying data stored on the private ledger.

MediConCen’s Blockchain Medical Ecosystem

Named as the Winner of Hong Kong’s “2020 Digital Disruptor” at the IDC Digital Transformation Awards (DXa) 2020, MediConCen simplifies medical insurance claims for medical community, insurers, and general customers using Hyperledger blockchain.

Traditional insurance systems require insured customers to present their physical card at the clinic, mail-in their medical receipts and claims for approval, followed by complicated administrative duties and time-consuming settlement procedures that many detest. Built on Hyperledger Fabric, MediConCen’s solution is the first blockchain medical ecosystem in Hong Kong, aimed at liberalizing the walled network to enhance the expected medical coverage, as well as greatly relieving clerical duties.

By automating the claim process through digital signatures and smart contracts, patients simply display their unique QR code for clinics to scan, thus revealing the corresponding plan and medical service they would provide. Offering efficiency and transparency to all parties involved with a complete and unique set of general ledgers and encrypting data of personal information to eliminate risks of leakage under the application of blockchain technology. This platform currently connects 200+ medical providers and 200,000+ medical insurance clients in Hong Kong.

Tech Mahindra’s plug-n-play solution to curb spam calls

By 2018, the spam call situation had grown grim in India, a country with more than 1 billion active mobile subscribers, causing bad customer experience and propagating of fake news and financial scams. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) acknowledged UCC (Unsolicited Commercial Communication) or spam calls were a major nuisance to telecom subscribers across the country and a growing menace that needed to be tackled with immediate effect. Though TRAI had established a “Do Not Disturb” (DND) list in 2010 with more than 230 million subscribers on it, unregistered telemarketers continue to spam customers, obtaining their consent through fraudulent and questionable tactics. Through various internal and external assessments, DLT was selected as the underlying technology to curb the menace.

Tech Mahindra developed a plug-n-play solution, built on Hyperledger Fabric, to mitigate the problem. With the solution successfully deployed across three major telcos in India, Tech Mahindra has access to >50% market. This solution has potential to have a global impact. Tech Mahindra has already reached out to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. market and is exploring opportunities to socialize it with U.S.-based telcos to address the pain points of robo-calling and caller ID spoofing are key pain areas that can be addressed by our solution.

Sep 28

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#HyperledgerFinTech: A sampling of production applications using Hyperledger technologies in the finance market

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha

The financial services market has long turned to technology to address a range of back-end challenges and enhance customer-facing services. Blockchain is increasingly becoming a go-to technology for advancing many different financial systems and solutions with different Hyperledger platforms serving as the core for an array of applications now in production.

Read on for just a sampling #HyperledgerFinTech solutions, built using a mix of Hyperledger technologies:

Bakong

Bakong was developed by Soramitsu and, after a soft launch in 2019, is now expanding with 16 financial institutions using the system and more expected to join in the near future. The project was also designed to promote financial inclusion for the country’s large number of unbanked citizens. Any citizen of the country can open a Bakong account, even if they don’t have a traditional bank account. The more than 500 merchants that accept Bakong can be viewed in a map inside the app.

daura

Built atop the private Swiss Trust Chain run by Swisscom and Swiss Post and powered by Hyperledger Fabric, daura is a digital share platform for financing and investing in Swiss SMEs. With daura, the share register is easily digitized and capital increases are carried out quickly and inexpensively at the push of a button. Shares can be split into any number of small lots and the share register is always digitally maintained, complete and up-to-date. With daura, companies have also transitioned virtual Annual General Meetings as a response to COVID-19 with authorization and access are granted directly via the blockchain.

ioCash

ioBuilders is a blockchain technology company focused on building regulated fintech and enterprise solutions based on distributed ledger technology to help businesses succeed in their blockchain adoption. The company offers professional services, including technical, business and regulatory, and develops its own product line. ioBuilders has been one of the first adopters and advocates of Hyperledger Besu, providing essential feedback to improve its enterprise requirements capabilities.

ioCash, one of ioBuilder’s core products, is a fintech platform enabling the use of regulated fiat money on blockchain networks, making it programmable with smart contracts and able to interact with other blockchain use cases. ioCash’s platform operates under an electronic money licence, providing accounts (with or without IBAN) and complex payments functionalities through API and smart contracts connectivity. ioCash is also available as a technology license for financial institutions that hold banking or electronic money licences and are aiming to add the benefits of blockchain into their payment systems.

Memberpass

CULedger, a credit union service organization (CUSO) that began when a group of credit unions came together in 2016 as a direct response to the increasing threat of fraud, set out to bring a decentralized identity solution product for credit unions to market. The result was MemberPass, a permanent, portable digital identity credential for credit union members.

Built in partnership with Evernym and using Hyperledger Indy, Memberpass replaces vulnerable authentication processes such as common knowledge-based questions. Now credit unions are able to issue a digital credential to members, giving them a hassle-free way to control and prove their identity quickly and easily while protecting their personal information.

Verified.Me

Verified.Me offers a secure and convenient way to help Canadians verify their identities.

Verified.Me is a service offered by SecureKey Technologies Inc. The Verified.Me service was developed in cooperation with seven of Canada’s major financial institutions – BMO, CIBC, Desjardins, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD. The Verified.Me network continues to evolve adding new identity providers and service providers to make your life easier.

Verified.Me is built on top of the IBM Blockchain Platform which is based on Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric v1.2, and will be interoperable with Hyperledger Indy projects.

Users of the Verified.Me mobile app or web browser experience are able to get a free credit score with Equifax, register with Sun Life, verify their identity when registering for Dynacare Plus, an online and mobile service that lets users manage their health remotely, and more.

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.

If you are interested in peer-to-peer transactions, mark your calendar for a webinar hosted by CoinDesk at 11:00 am ET on October 20th. A panel of experts on different Hyperledger platforms will be discussing “Governance, standards and interoperability: Getting past the roadblocks to peer-to-peer financial transactions.” Go here to find out more.

Aug 26

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Hyperledger-Powered Education Solutions in Action

By Hyperledger Blog, Education, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha

Just before the age of COVID began in earnest, The New York Times ran a feature on “How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education.” The rise of remote learning and other pandemic-related changes and challenges have added to the need and opportunity for technology-driven advances.

The Hyperledger community is doing its part to help the higher education market adapt to an increasingly digital world. Below we look at five Hyperledger-powered solutions that are at work now in the education market. They are helping colleges and universities modernize how they tackle a number of core tasks, including issuing and verifying academic credits, automating on-campus payments and managing students’ identity and privacy.

Read on for more about these #HyperledgerEdu solutions, built using a mix of Hyperledger technologies:

Byacco, an on-campus payment system

Soramitsu has officially released Byacco, a payment system based on Hyperledger Iroha, for the University of Aizu, Japan. Byacco is a system that allows students and staff of the University of Aizu to use an application on their phones to pay for goods in the cafeteria and university store and to transfer funds within the campus. To make a transaction, all they need is to scan or to provide a QR code, depending on the operation. Byacco’s technology also has high standards for transfers: it follows the EMV® QR Code specification and has bank application level financial security protocols. The keys that are used to authorise transactions on the blockchain are stored only on the device, in a secure storage, so that no one except the owner can access the funds. Students of the university can join the development of the system, thus acquiring skills in creating financial systems based on Hyperledger technologies.

DoDream, a “Study Abroad Platform”

Dain Leaders is an education solution provider for universities in Korea. It serves more than 45 Korean universities by providing services for students’ career path development. As part of that effort, Dain Leader is introducing its “Study Abroad Platform,” called DoDream, to support the extended education ecosystem of the universities, accreditation and related agencies, and prospective employers. Based on Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service (which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric), the platform is an O2O service that provides foreign students with information on studying in Korea and a matching service with Korean universities.

Oracle Digital Certificates Solution

In the face of fast-changing demographic and economic drivers and student expectations, the current processes for issuing and verifying student certificates are too inefficient and time consuming. They can also lead to fraudulent or counterfeit certifications.

The Oracle Digital Certificates Solution, built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform (based on Hyperledger Fabric), provides a complete, end-to-end solution for educational institutions to issue verifiable tamper-proof and secure credential certification that improves the student experience after graduation and improves operational efficiency. The solution enables institutions to issue digital certificates along with transcripts and provide self-sovereign capability to the students who can share them securely with third parties through an access token.

This solution has been successfully deployed in production by customers like China Distance Education Holdings Limited (CDEL) and Taibah Valley University. CDEL uses Oracle Blockchain to share educational records and professional certifications across many educational institutions to help employers and recruiters verify the educational credentials claimed by individuals.

Many other institutions like national universities, employment agencies, government organizations, professional skills academies and universities that provide student grants/scholarships are using this solution as part of ongoing or planned pilots.

PwC Smart Credentials

Data is the new gravity in the world today and organisations are gravitating to and concentrating around trust as the ultimate currency in this data driven world. This trust is crucial for people to exchange information, especially in this digital age when trust is often violated.

With that premise, PwC developed Smart Credentials, a credential issuance, sharing, reviewing and revocation platform levegering the inherent core benefits of blockchain technology such as immutability, tamper-proof nature, transparency, authenticity and security.

Built using Hyperleder Indy and Hyperledger Aries to support the verification process, Smart Credentials has two key pillars: Authentication (you are who you say you are) and Authorization (genuine claim). Both are crucial ingredients of building trust in any ecosystem.

Smart Credentials recently won a “Bronze” medal for the Best Global Blockchain Innovation 2019 at the Reimagine Innovation awards (Backed by Wharton and QS) and is a finalist in the DataIQ 2020 awards “Best data product/ service” of the year category.

Verified.Me

As higher education moves deeper into online and remote learning for traditional and non-traditional students, colleges and universities are now offering a broader array of services that extend the campus experience to the digital realm. Beyond the advent of digital programming, educational institutions are also privy to sensitive personal student, faculty and alumni data from income and payment information to disciplinary records, healthcare and insurance information.

SecureKey Technologies’ Verified.Me service is one approach that supports education’s new digital and data privacy demands. This new digital identity verification service can help verify students, alumni and faculty in a timely and secure manner, strengthening educational institutions’ ability to expand their digital offerings with confidence – while also providing much-needed cost savings. Verified.Me is built using the IBM Blockchain Platform, which is based on Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications supporting the higher education marketing with #HyperledgerEdu this month on social channels. Also, Hyperledger has an Education Architecture Special Interest Group that is open to all.

Aug 17

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National Bank of Cambodia’s New Digital Payment System: How Soramitsu Helped Modernize Retail Payments Using Hyperledger Iroha

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Iroha

In the Kingdom of Cambodia in Southeast Asia, three-quarters (78%) of its citizens have no bank account, yet more than half own a smartphone. And even though the native currency—the Khmer riel (KHR)—has been stable for 20 years, most people there use the American dollar. Ever since a major UN mission in the mid-1990s, the price of everything from a cup of coffee to a car has been given in U.S. dollars.

Addressing these challenges and more, the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) set out to see if a digital payment system could handle transactions faster and for lower cost than the existing system.

Could it promote wider use of the riel? And could that system run as a mobile app that any citizen with a smartphone could use to shop or transfer money to family or friends?

To find out, NBC partnered with blockchain developer experts Soramitsu on a retail payment system project that would modernize the country’s legacy retail payments with the help of the Hyperledger Iroha blockchain framework.

When most people picture a CBDC, they imagine an entirely new digital asset created out of “thin air.” The problem is, this new asset could distort a country’s monetary policy and affect its exchange rates. To be prudent, Cambodia’s central bank wanted to create a digital token backed by fiat currency stored safely in its vaults. The new payments platform would become a way to move around digitized cash, while preserving the creditworthiness and security of the central bank.

The resulting project, called Bakong, is the first retail payments system in the world using blockchain technology. Individuals can now transfer money and buy from merchants with a simple smartphone app. Merchants gain a fast, cashless, and secure payments system. And banks can do interbank transfers at much lower cost.

The pilot project went live in July 2019 and ran successfully with a network of 14 banks supporting more than 10,000 users, laying the groundwork for a large-scale rollout later this year.

Hyperledger teamed up with Soramitsu on a detailed case study covering the planning and implementation of Bakong, including key goals, milestones, security considerations and core technology requirements, as well as a preview of rollout plans and new features.

Read the full case study here.

Sep 19

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2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: Integration of EVM from Hyperledger Burrow into Hyperledger Iroha

By Ivan Tyulyandin Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

Hello, my name is Ivan Tyulyandin. I am a student at Saint Petersburg State University. I took part in the Hyperledger Internship Program, working with Andrei Lebedev (my mentor), Iurii Vinogradov and Eugene Kovalev from the Hyperledger Iroha team.

Hyperledger Iroha is a straightforward distributed ledger technology, inspired by the Japanese Kaizen principle — eliminate excessiveness. Users can create and manage their assets via Iroha commands. Iroha is written using C++, Protobuf, Boost and GTest. There are no smart contracts in Iroha.

Introduction

Hyperledger Burrow provides a modular blockchain client with the possibility to change different parts of the system. One modular piece is a permissioned smart contract engine, partially developed to the specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Burrow is developed using language Go.

The main purpose of this internship was to integrate EVM from Hyperledger Burrow into Hyperledger Iroha. Since Ethereum is de facto the most known platform for smart contract development, the integration will let Ethereum developers use Iroha as a new blockchain in distributed applications.

Project Components

The starting point was identifying the main components the project needed to address:

First of all, there should be a way to pass data (such as Ethereum bytecode, caller and callee) from Hyperledger Iroha to Hyperledger Burrow EVM. For this purpose, a new command to Iroha has to be added.
Another issue is to connect Golang and C++ code to bind Iroha and EVM.
The next step is to implement a special Burrow API to store EVM accounts data in Iroha.
The final requirement is new functionality testing.

Challenges

One of the challenges was to get deeper into the codebases of Hyperledger Burrow and Hyperledger Iroha. Existing integration examples of Burrow EVM to Fabric and Sawtooth gave me a nice understanding of what to do. From the Iroha side, Andrei Lebedev led me through the Iroha source code.

Results

With this information, I was able to develop a new command EngineCall. I made a wrapper using CGO (special go compiler mode that generates C library from Go source code) that Iroha uses to call Burrow EVM. Now an implementation of Burrow EVM API can send requests to Iroha for modification of its state via Protobuf messages. Every EVM account is stored in a technical account in Iroha. EVM account storage is emulated in the technical account details (which is key-value storage). All of this work was QA’d by writing and completing module and integration testing.

What comes next

More features can be added to this integration. The first one is web3 interface implementation, which will call remote EVM instance or use a local one. The next possible improvement is to add permissions to an Iroha account that represents an EVM account. Also, the current support of Burrow EVM in Iroha is not full, since there is no catching of EVM logs.

For more on this project, please read my full report.

Sep 19

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2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: Integration of Hyperledger Iroha into Hyperledger Explorer

By Ruslan Tushov Blog, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

Hyperledger Iroha is a next-generation permissioned DLT initally contributed by Soramitsu. It provides asset and identity management, multi-signature and batch transactions. During the internship, I visited the Soramitsu office and communicated with Iroha development team.

Hyperledger Explorer is a tool that shows information from DLT networks. Initially, it was built to support for Hyperledger Fabric, with the expecting support for more DLTs would be added. Our goal was to add support for collecting and viewing Iroha transactions and Iroha-specific information to Hyperledger Explorer.

Accomplishments:

We implemented an integration of Hyperledger Iroha into Hyperledger Explorer. Now, Hyperledger Explorer shows information about Hyperledger Iroha peers, blocks, transactions, roles, domains, accounts.
We found and fixed some ambiguous statements in Hyperledger Iroha documentation.
We simplified code of our project by using open-source GraphQL framework developed by Facebook.

For a deeper dive into the work, read my full project report here.

I am very grateful for the support of my mentor, Ales Zivkovic, as well as Hyperledger for the opportunity to learn and contribute to open source Hyperledger projects.

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Hyperledger Iroha

Extend Hyperledger Iroha Queries with Optional Arguments

Final Project Video

Mentee

Mentor

Introduction

Project Components

Challenges﻿

What comes next

Challenges