Category

Hyperledger Iroha

Sep 26
0

Hyperledger Gains 10 New Members

By | Announcements, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Growth in open blockchain consortium doubles over past year with more than 160 members

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (September 26, 2017) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, announced today that 10 new organizations have joined the project. As a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort, Hyperledger incubates eight business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies including Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Sawtooth, among others.

“The immense growth we’ve seen this year signifies an acceptance and understanding of Hyperledger blockchain solutions for business,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “These new diverse members have agreed to contribute their leadership and energy to the Hyperledger community. We thank them for their support and validation as we drive towards more PoCs, pilots and production uses cases of Hyperledger technologies in the enterprise.”

Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology. The latest General members include: AMIHAN, ChongQin Xichain Technologies, DLT Labs, GameCredits, Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX), Medicalchain and ScanTrust.

Hyperledger supports an open community that values contributions and participation from various entities. As such, pre-approved non-profits, open source projects and government entities can join Hyperledger at no cost as Associate members. Several Associate members joined this month including Mercy Corps, Taiwan Fintech Association and Zhejiang University.

New member quotes:

AMIHAN

“Amihan is proud to be the first Filipino company to join Hyperledger,” said Winston Damarillo, Chairman of Amihan Global Strategies. “We believe that blockchain and smart contracts are the key to preparing Southeast Asia for the digital age, and we are committed to working with the Hyperledger community to push the limits of blockchain technology. We look forward to working with our clients – some of the largest enterprises in ASEAN – to transform finance, healthcare, retail, and customer loyalty in one of the fastest-growing regions of the world.”

DLT Labs

“At DLT Labs, our corporate purpose is to create, integrate, and support dynamic distributed ledger solutions that equip our clients with the tools to capitalize on unrealized potential within their businesses,” said Loudon Owen, Chairman and CEO of DLT Labs. “With over 30 dedicated in-house Blockchain developers and over 20 proprietary enterprise products, DLT Labs has formed globe-spanning partnerships with leading edge consultancies, manufacturers, financial institution and innovative service providers. Our global presence spans the United States, the United Kingdom, China, India, Canada and Singapore. DLT is excited at the opportunity to join Hyperledger’s nexus of leaders, creators, and dreamers, and looks forward to forming long-lasting relationships with the forefront of blockchain innovators.”

GameCredits

“We are excited to join the company of industry leaders in Hyperledger,” said Alex Migitko, COO, GameCredits. “GameCredits is focused on a unique blockchain use case, catering to the $100 billion gaming industry and its massive audience of almost every third person on earth, governed by complex relations between various stakeholders. Our solutions will be of immense interest to adjacent industries and we believe we will be able to make a unique contribution to the alliance.”

Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX)

“We are today at the beginning of the blockchain revolution, witnessing in real time an explosion of ideas, experiments and projects that aim to completely redesign global capital markets for the new era,” said Nick Cowan, CEO, Gibraltar Stock Exchange. “The Gibraltar Stock Exchange’s membership in Hyperledger provides us with an exciting opportunity to connect, share ideas and collaborate with like minded innovators and industry leaders, without boundaries, with the aim of building consensus for the new global framework.”

Medicalchain

“Medicalchain puts health records back into the hands of patients, and that’s not possible without the secure storage and transfer of data. Using Hyperledger, Medicalchain will allow patients to control permissions to their health records – who gets access to them, what information they get access to and for how long,” said Dr. Albeyatti, co-founder of Medicalchain. “We are thrilled to join the Hyperledger community and will continue working to bring blockchain technology to the healthcare industry.”

ScanTrust

“Today’s connected consumers are demanding more transparency and with global supply chains becoming more complex, achieving this a challenging task,” said Nathan Anderson, CEO and Co-Founder, ScanTrust. “ScanTrust secure identifiers connect physical goods to the internet for enhanced supply chain security; by adding open blockchain technology to this foundation, brands will be able to protect and track their products using mobile phone authentication. We look forward to collaborating with the Hyperledger community to develop a scalable, enterprise-grade blockchain framework.”

To see a full list of member companies, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/members. If you’re interested in joining Hyperledger as a member company, please visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/join

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

 

 

Sep 14
0

Mentorship at Hyperledger: Four Interns Share Their Appreciation for Great Mentors

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

If you read about the projects that Hyperledger’s summer interns have just completed, you’ll quickly see that these are serious internships that come with the prize of greater knowledge, skills, and connections with the technical community. One of the most important of these connections is the connection to a great mentor.

As part of our efforts to foster the development of blockchain talent globally, we pair each of our interns up with an expert to mentor and guide them. Here are all the ways that the mentors involved with Hyperledger’s 2017 summer internship program made a difference, in the words of our interns.

    • “My mentor, Baohua Yang from IBM, helped me in the project to understand and contribute.” — Indirajith Vijai Ananth
    • “My mentor, Jiang Feihu from Huawei Technologies, is one of the most supportive mentors I’ve come across to work with. Right from my selection for the internship, he started mentoring me and strategizing everything, although it was still a month difference from the official beginning of the internship. He’s a good mentor who helped me at every single difficulty that struck my way.” — Nikhil Chawla
    • “My mentor was Makoto Takemiya from Soramitsu, and his mentorship helped me understand how Hyperledger Iroha and similar projects worked. We had meetings every week where progress on projects would be presented and where I would ask questions regarding details on Hyperledger Iroha and what the best way of achieving certain tasks would be. Makoto is a very skilled developer and he guided my research and development process to make sure everything was on track.” — Ezequiel Gomez
    • “My mentor was László Gönczy from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and Quanopt Ltd. His profound knowledge in business process modeling was a continuous source of guidance and support for my work. Firstly, he helped me to select of the BPMN elements to be implemented in the experimental prototype. The BPMN has an extremely large variety of notions in its metamodel (the standard being hundreds of pages long), but the important elements commonly used in the industry form only a smaller subset. Secondly, he helped to refine my approach by providing common, yet complex use cases/sample models. The expert guidance of my mentor played a significant part in successfully completing the project. Our work enjoyed a huge benefit of the professional advices of Imre Kocsis (BME).” — Attila Klenik

Thank you to all of Hyperledger’s mentors for fostering new blockchain talent and ensuring a successful 2017 summer internship program!

Sep 07
0

Interning with Hyperledger: 4 Interns Share Their Experiences and Advice

By | Blog, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Just recently, four talented individuals finished summer internships with Hyperledger. We’re proud to congratulate them on a job well done!

Here, they share details about their projects and advice for students considering an internship in open source software.

About the Projects

Nikhil Chawla from India, mentored by Jiang Feihu from Huawei Technologies, worked on deploying Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes using Hyperledger Cello. Nikhil’s approach was twofold. First, it involved manually running Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes. Second, it involved automating the deployment using Hyperledger Cello. Nikhil says, “There were a long trail of issues I got to address via this internship. But identifying the levels was a good idea and subdividing the tasks helped me a lot. Moreover, the community channels like Slack and Rocket.Chat were a huge help. I used a variety of measures that can be adapted to reach each sub-task and eventually, solving them optimally.”

Indirajith Vijai Ananth from Italy, mentored by Baohua Yang from IBM, worked on improving and implementing features in Hyperledger Cello. Indirajith says, “The approach can be categorised into three major steps. First, to learn basics and get acquainted to the technology and the domain. Then, to learn deeper by going through the code to understand where and what to work on. The last step was to get involved from writing code and reporting bugs. The outcome of my project was the implementation of a health check feature in Hyperledger Cello for Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 network. This involved restructuring and updating image downloading scripts for Hyperledger Fabric and the respective documentation.”

Ezequiel Gomez from Mexico, mentored by Makoto Takemiya from Soramitsu, worked on anonymous transactions in Hyperledger Iroha. Ezequiel says, “The approach was to first look at how projects that currently have the ability to issue anonymous transactions work. Given that there is a small number of projects that achieve this efficiently, we based our work on Zcash and their usage of zk-SNARKs. The next step was to fully understand the different parts in the Zcash protocol and how this could be implemented on top of the Hyperledger Iroha ledger. I became acquainted with the development community of Zcash Company which helped me understand the academic papers that motivated the project. Given that the core of the project was usage of different cryptographic protocols, most of my research was focused on things such as key establishment, digital signatures and zero knowledge proofs. Since one has to be very careful when working with cryptographic protocols, researching the specifics on each part of the protocol was necessary to avoid mistakes when implementing cryptographic primitives.”

The project depended on staying in sync with the team of developers working on Hyperledger Iroha. Ezequiel says, “The outcome of the project was a standalone service with the functionality needed to implement anonymous transactions into the Hyperledger Iroha distributed ledger. Given that v1.0 of Hyperledger Iroha is still under development, the team decided to have me work on the anonymous transaction part as a standalone service while the team implements an unspent transaction output (UTXO) transaction model into Hyperledger Iroha after v1.0 is released. Without a UTXO model anonymous transactions would not be possible, since the current account model has no way of hiding who the owner of the assets is. The standalone service is not yet finished, and some parts of this service will be developed depending on how the UTXO model gets implemented into Hyperledger Iroha but it currently has two contributors on GitHub working on finishing its components.”

Attila Klenik from Hungary, mentored by László Gönczy from Quanopt and Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE), worked on contract-based business process execution. Attila says, “The goals of the project were 1) to evaluate whether Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (chaincodes) can fulfill the roles of a business process execution engine, and 2) to develop a methodology for the (almost) automatic migration of business process models (BPM) to the Hyperledger Fabric framework. This approach will enable the merge of existing sophisticated methods in business process modeling with the sound basis of blockchain frameworks.”

The complete coverage of Business Model Process and Notation (BPMN) is still a future work but according to Attila’s expectations, it can follow the approach and technology developed. Attila says, “The core result of the project is a conceptual proof of concept of using BPMN for designing smart contracts. This complements evolving technologies like incorporating business rule systems into blockchain applications by using the Hyperledger Fabric for communication and synchronization purposes. The feasibility of the general approach is proven by a pilot transformation of core BPMN elements to chaincode frames and an ongoing activity targets the re-use of the code developed in traditional BPMN frameworks. The subset implemented is sufficiently rich to support the most common applications.”

Advice to Students Considering an Internship in Open Source Software

As you can see from the experiences above, summer internships in open source software are serious internships that come with the prize of greater knowledge, skills, and connections to the technical community.

If you, or someone you know, is planning to pursue an internship in open source software, here’s a collection of tips they can use from Hyperledger’s 2017 summer interns: Nikhil, Indirajith, Ezequiel, and Attila.

  1. Starting work on an open source project can be a little overwhelming. It’s easy to lose yourself in the details due to a desire to know everything. This is a good thing of course, but not right at the start. To get around this, use a top-down approach when exploring such a project. Focus on the parts you need to work on (or use), and treat everything else like a black box. Once you get familiar with the top, you may take a step toward the bottom.
  2. Don’t be afraid to jump into chat rooms with the project community and ask away! Open source project communities are eager to help new developers and work very hard to make sure future contributors have the resources necessary to understand the codebase. Reading white papers is a good first step before diving into the code. Large open source projects may seem intimidating at first because of their size, but after a higher-level understanding on how the project works, looking at its individual parts will become much easier!
  3. Another way to get started is by cloning the repository of the particular project of interest and start fixing the basic bugs. Slowly, progress can be made by submitting patches and test codes. Eventually, this leads to contributing to an open source project that is going to leave a mark of its own in this technology-driven world.
  4. Before contributing to open source, look at the guidelines for contributing. Going through each and every document is a must, without it you’ll definitely fall into trouble.
  5. There’s a huge variety of projects for all different genres in open source, so choosing the right project is must. Never follow the crowd.
  6. Don’t lose hope if you struggle at first. Soon, you can master open source!

There is plenty of work to be done in open source. Be sure to let the talented students in your life know about this exciting career path.

Sep 06
0

ABCs of Open Governance

By | Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Chaintool, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Today, most people understand the concept of Open Source – certainly we expect most readers of this blog understand it. View the code, use the code, copy the code, change the code, and, depending on the license, contribute back changes or not.

What many people don’t get, and something we here at Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation pride ourselves on doing well, is Open Governance.

The Linux Foundation, and all of our 60+ open source projects, are not-for-profits building the greatest shared R&D investment in history. Open Governance is central to this promise.

Open Governance means that technical decisions -– which features to add, how to add them and when, among others – for a given Open Source project or projects are made by a group of community-elected developers drawn from a pool of active participants. It is as close to the ideal of pure technical meritocracy as one can get and we strive continuously to reach that ideal.

Hyperledger recently concluded the 2017-2018 Technical Steering Committee (TSC) election, and so we thought it an opportune time to explain the ABCs of Open Governance. Please note that this is one Open Governance implementation and clearly not the only way to do it, but rather one proven and effective way.

What does the Hyperledger TSC do?

The TSC charter spells out the group’s responsibilities.

The TL;DR is that the TSC is the ultimate authority on technical decisions. This includes which new projects are admitted to Hyperledger , which current projects graduate from Incubation to Active , and the rules by which each Hyperledger project will operate.

Participation in Hyperledger through becoming a Contributor and/or Maintainer is open to anyone.
Hyperledger Charter Section 4C

As a developer or maintainer, this translates into one thing: trust. You know how decisions will be made and the process by which people will be selected to make these decisions. Hyperledger is vendor-neutral and technical contributions are based on meritocracy. We will always remain immune to the commercial interests of any single company.

The TSC election process consists of three simple steps:

  1. Identification of eligible participants
  2. Nominations
  3. Voting

Who is really eligible to be on the TSC?

The charter spells out that the TSC voting members shall consist of eleven (11) elected Contributors or Maintainers chosen by the Active Contributors.

So, how do you determine an active contributor, you may ask? As part of the current election, every project maintainer and Working Group leader was asked to provide a list of all the people that have contributed to their work in the past year. In addition, a review of all code and other contributions was conducted.

This year, 424 active contributors were identified as eligible to participate in the TSC election process.

Bring It (your nomination that is)

The Linux Foundation maintains an expert staff with decades of combined experience managing the operations of large scale, Openly Governed Open Source projects.

For Hyperledger, the Sr. Program Manager Todd Benzies ensures the trains run on time.

Below is Todd’s email calling for TSC nominations:

This nominating process produced 32 candidates for the 11 TSC spots. These 32 come from 20 different organizations, across a spectrum of industries, from technology vendors to foundations to end users from a variety of industries. They include people who work at Hyperledger members and non-members and some are standing as individuals.

A policy whose importance is hard to overstate is that anyone elected to a seat on the TSC is elected as a person unbound to the company for which they presently work. Should any TSC member during their tenure leave an employer for another, this would have zero impact on their standing as member of the Hyperledger TSC.

Cast your vote

Here is Todd’s email sent to the same list announcing the nominees and opening voting.

The arrow highlights one of the things that we’ve learned along the way as a trick to the trade of running open governance well. The voting system has to be unquestionably secure and fair (something by now truly everyone can relate to…).

We use the Condorcet Internet Voting System to safeguard the privacy of this election and voting process. CIVS can only be accessed by authorized voters, who receive a unique URL tied to their email address. Voters rank a set of possible choices and individual voter rankings are combined into an anonymous overall ranking of the choices. One vote is allowed per IP address.

Results

This process yields a fairly and openly-elected technical decision making body pulled from the community that cares about Hyperledger. We know they care not because they said so, not because the company they work for has joined Hyperledger, but because they invested their time to make contributions to Hyperledger code bases. Or, as Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf says, “it’s a do -ocracy.”

Meet the New Hyperledger TSC (listed in alphabetical order)

Arnaud Le Hors
Baohua Yang
Binh Nguyen
Christopher Ferris
Dan Middleton
Greg Haskins
Hart Montgomery
Jonathan Levi (new)
Kelly Olson (new)
Mic Bowman
Nathan George (new)

If you’re interested in learning more about the Hyperledger TSC and its elected members, we’ll be kicking off a “Meet the TSC” blog series in the coming weeks. Be sure to look out for it!

You can plug into the community at github , Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list .

Aug 29
0

Congratulations to the Hyperledger Interns and Mentors on Completed Summer Internships

By | Blog, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As part of Hyperledger’s mission to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, we strive to foster talent globally. One way we do this is through a summer internship program.

The Hyperledger summer internship program pairs talented university students with blockchain experts from the technical community. Each intern takes on a specific project that will benefit the Hyperledger community and his or her mentor provides guidance to help the intern be successful.

This month, interns from Mexico, Hungary, Italy, and India have completed their internships and will be returning to their university communities to use and share what they have learned.

  • Attila Klenik from Hungary, mentored by László Gönczy from Quanopt and Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE), returns to BUTE. Attila worked on contract-based business process execution.
  • Ezequiel Gomez from Mexico, mentored by Makoto Takemiya from Soramitsu, returns to Boston University. Ezequiel worked on anonymous transactions in Hyperledger Iroha.
  • Indirajith Vijai Ananth from Italy, mentored by Baohua Yang from IBM, returns to University of Rome Tor Vergata. Indirajith worked on improving and implementing features in Hyperledger Cello.
  • Nikhil Chawla from India, mentored by Jiang Feihu from Huawei Technologies, returns to Northern India Engineering College. Nikhil worked on deploying Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes using Hyperledger Cello.

Here’s a snapshot of our accomplished interns across the globe:

In upcoming posts about interning at Hyperledger, we’ll share details about the projects and advice for students considering an internship in open source software. We’ll also discuss the important role of mentorship.

Jun 29
0

Hyperledger’s Monthly Technical Update

By | Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As our incubated projects continue to mature, we’d like to update the community monthly on the progress we make. Below are June updates on Hyperledger projects.

Hyperledger Burrow

  • Implementation of dynamic memory on the Ethereum Virtual Machine
  • New type-safe Application Binary Interface package for translating data to Ethereum contracts into packed Ethereum bytes for transaction formulation (logical requirement for Ethereum chain; but all package implementations thus far have been GPLv3 licensed, as such in tooling code not included in Burrow; this new package will be able to go into Hyperledger Burrow under Apache license)
  • Alpha of batching client for new API with high transaction throughput (> 400 tx/s)
  • Various bug fixes
  • First prototype of Burrow EVM to run as transaction processor on Hyperledger Sawtooth Ledger

Hyperledger Cello

  • A user dashboard was added to support seeing blockchain status and chaincodes.
  • The k8s support features was started with intern students; Upgrade swarm support to latest version (17.04).
  • Refine the installation scripts to support multi-os-distributions.
  • Fabric 1.0-* supported scripts was added.

Hyperledger Composer

  • We completed all rebranding activities as part of the move to Hyperledger – we moved to the Hyperledger Docker Hub organization, and renamed the Yeoman generator module.
  • We added support for modelling and publishing events from a transaction processor function, allowing client applications and existing systems to respond to events from a deployed business network.
  • We made extensive changes to our new user and getting started documentation, including reworked installation guides and tutorials which are available in the docs: https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/introduction/introduction.html
  • We delivered a set of nodes for Node-RED which allow developers to easily build outbound and inbound integration between a deployed business network and external system using IoT/MQTT, WebSockets, TCP, etc.
  • We added experimental support for invoking external HTTP APIs from within a transaction processor function, allowing external data such as share prices to be used within business logic.
  • We are currently focusing on delivering Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 beta support, complex query support (by exploiting CouchDB), and a new vehicle lifecycle demo that shows off the power of Composer.

Hyperledger Explorer

  • No major updates to report this month.

Hyperledger Fabric

  • Hyperledger Fabric v1.0.0-beta was released, and the maintainers plan on weekly releases until we have a demonstrably stable release candidate. We hope to be able to release in late July if all goes well.
  • The project’s engineers have significantly increased test coverage (+82%) and reduced its open defect count (~130 -> 22) since the 1.0.0-alpha2 release. It has been encouraging to see the diversity of contributions. It the past month alone, we have had contributions from 73 individuals representing 12 companies (including IBM) and 12 unaffiliated individuals.
  • The project is seeing a steadily increasing stream of downloads of the milestone releases with global coverage (US, Brazil, China, India, UK, Germany, France, Croatia, Russia, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and even Pakistan). There is an abundance of interest in China, India and Japan, nearly rivaling the US.
  • The remaining focus is on improving the documentation, continuing to test and fix bugs, and complete the various license, crypto-export and security scans.

Hyperledger Indy

  • No major updates to report this month.

Hyperledger Iroha

  • No major updates to report this month.

Hyperledger Sawtooth

  • Graduated to Active status! 
  • Project page new and improved, now with demo networks: https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth
  • Collaborating with Hyperledger Burrow to integrate EVM with Sawtooth.
  • Added “State Delta Subscriptions” for pub/sub feature
  • Added Supply Chain Transaction Family
  • Providing Hyperledger Sawtooth features for Open Music Initiative Summer Lab.
  • Completed Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative badge requirements.

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: [email protected].

Happy coding!

 

Jun 14
0

Meet the Hyperledger Interns!

By | Blog, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Back in March we announced Hyperledger’s inaugural summer internship program. We put together several internship projects that span across our incubated projects (Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth) proposed by active developers in the technical community.

Today, we’d like to introduce each intern, provide info on what they will be working on and get to know them a bit better. We asked each intern a few questions like what issue or problem they hope blockchain can solve and where they hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years.

Let’s see what they had to say!

 

Attila Klenik

Attila Klenik, Budapest University of Technology and Economic

A PhD student at Budapest University of Technology and Economic studying performance model identification and optimization of blockchain systems

Hyperledger Intern Project: Contract-Based Business Process Execution

1. What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Blockchain (and related frameworks, like Hyperledger Fabric) can serve as a firm foundation for critical applications in nearly all domains. Being a distributed, highly available, synchronization medium, developers can satisfy many requirements of critical systems using a single middleware, not to mention the additional security provided by blockchain.

2. Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

In my honest opinion, in five years Hyperledger Fabric and blockchain will be just as supported by Business Process Modeling as traditional technologies nowadays. Mature toolchains will support the high-level design of blockchain-based systems. Technically and legally certified domain specific templates for smart contracts and pattern libraries for process design will elevate the trust at the technical level to that of the business. Furthermore, “blockchainification” i.e. using the Blockchain technology as a substitute for sequential inter party communication in consolidating and re engineering existing applications will be as common, as it was/is with the cloud. I believe blockchain will be a dominant technology, especially in the business process domain.

Ezequiel Gomez

Ezequiel Gomez, Boston University

An international undergraduate student from Mexico studying at Boston University

Hyperledger Intern Project: Anonymous Transactions in Hyperledger Iroha

1. What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Growing up in Latin America where financial institutions and governments are known to be very corrupt, the transparency of blockchains immediately caught my eye. Every year the amount of money sent to Mexico in the form of remittances increases, reaching an all-time high of 26,987 million dollars in 2016. As money flows in, a lot of this money is being kept by intermediary financial institutions or service providers that keep a percentage of this money and take a long time processing these payments. Remittances rank third in the sources of foreign exchange coming into Mexico, and around 43% of the 26,970 million dollars sent every year is being sent through intermediaries other than banks. These intermediaries charge workers 3-4% of the money being sent back to Mexico, but since the exchange rate from USD to MXN Pesos must also be taken into account, the families are only receiving around 83% of the money initially sent. Given that the monthly average transfer is around $300USD, a 17% increase would give the average receiving family $50 extra dollars every month. I hope that blockchain solutions can lower the transaction fees so that the Mexican workers are better rewarded for the sacrifices of being an immigrant. Given that blockchain transactions require no intermediary and have transaction fees much lower than 17% of the money being transferred they are already fit to solve this problem. However, we need to create blockchain solutions that make this technology more accessible to the average person.

2. Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

I hope to see Blockchain providing businesses new solutions, allowing them to incorporate new business models and businesses trusting this new technology when searching for new solutions. Hyperledger provides businesses with properly architected blockchain and distributed ledger solutions, which can be implemented into incorporate new business models and solutions that would make industries more efficient. As more companies join Hyperledger, the amount of developers actively contributing to Hyperledger will grow as well. Within the next five years the distributed ledgers built by Hyperledger projects will be used to provide businesses with new solutions and opportunities, and the expanding community of developers will work hand in hand with business leaders to make sure there is a codebase that can fit their needs. A recent report on the current state of blockchains done by McKinsey found more than 60 use cases for blockchains after surveying 200 companies from different industries, and predict that based on the current rate of evolution, blockchain solutions will reach their full potential in the next 5 years. McKinsey identified seven use cases for blockchains which could generate 80-100 billion dollars in impact. Given the amount of innovation that blockchains will bring to the table in business solutions, I am excited to be part of this revolution with the future leaders of blockchain solutions.

References:

http://eleconomista.com.mx/finanzas-publicas/2017/02/05/11-datos-sobre-envio-remesas-mexico

http://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=9109

Indirajith Vijai Ananth

Indirajith Vijai Ananth, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

A Ph.D. student at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy studying Data Security and Privacy
Hyperledger Intern Project: Design and Implement Blockchain Clustering Platform for Hyperledger

1. What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Blockchain can provide open standard distributed ledger technology, which will provide more open and provisioned/controlled database of moving/transferring objects. One should not need to keep a separate record of objects and their state. Stakeholders can have their relative info at any stage of a transaction or lifecycle of an object or asset.

It is also more secure so, each stakeholder can be able to keep a record for them and contribute to the distributed structure to strengthen it.

2. Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

In five years down the line, I think blockchain will be the backbone network of several mobile applications, the core of supply chain industries, logistics and even will be a mandatory tool or technological solution of several governmental records keeping departments. With the help of Hyperledger, anyone can have their own blockchain which can be tweaked to custom built to address one’s own problem.

Nikhil Chawla

Nikhil Chawla, Northern India Engineering

An undergrad student at the Northern India Engineering pursuing a Computer Science and Engineering degree

Hyperledger Intern Project: Deploy Fabric on Kubernetes Using Hyperledger Cello

1. What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Blockchains are generally considered in technical grounds with Bitcoins (Cryptocurrency), where transaction of bitcoins is shared between the authorized parties and a ledger of those transactions is maintained among those authorized parties only. But, one of the diverse uses of blockchain I think is in healthcare where a patient has the freedom to share is medical history and other medication details, with the doctors he would want to share everything. Now, consider a scenario where a patient is being treated by multiple doctors at the same time, then, how easy it will be for the doctors to check the medical history in form of transactions of the patient. And suppose if one doctor makes an addition to his medication then it will be automatically updated in the ledger of other authorised doctors as well, and accordingly he can also make changes if needed. This is one of the significant aspect of blockchains (Hyperledger), as modernization is affecting the life force of humans, so it should be made as easy as possible for the humans to maintain their health in a modern era. Apparently, on the same concept of “Healthcare”, I along with some colleagues initiated a project named “Medcare” which was focused on a centralized system for maintaining patient’s health record and patient would authorize the doctors of his choice to have a look on his/her medical records. Unfortunately, we couldn’t give it a push due to lack of resources and time, but I assume blockchains can make it happen in a resourceful way.

2. Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

Blockchain is a growing technology which has the potential to affect industries like, Finance, Healthcare, Software Testing and many more. Blockchains can be used to eliminate the need of 3rd-party ledger which is currently a part of online transaction system, like, while using Paytm for mobile recharge, a 3rd party ledger is being maintained by Paytm itself for your transaction, although the transaction occurred between you and your connection provider (Airtel,Vodafone etc.). I think ideally these whole transactions must be maintained between two parties only because 3rd party ledger are a kind of vulnerability which might cause a breach in security. In Healthcare , Blockchains can bring a whole new world which is a tightly coupled secure network, where privacy of patient records can be maintained easily and at the same time it is easily accessible from anywhere, anytime, if the person has the access using a signed digital contract or something like this. In software testing, It can help to solve some unsolvable problems such as Byzantine  fault  tolerance , Two Generals Problem and so on which are currently unsolvable with a proof. To understand this better, assume a situation, where a distributed database is being maintained using blockchains, if one transaction is occurred in these two connected nodes , and one of them fails and crashes down, then, the other connected node can help us to rectify the problem and can help to avoid this situation to occur in future. Now, as the time will pass, certain new areas will also be discovered where blockchain would act as a elixir and Hyperledger being a widely renowned project which aims to develop resourceful blockchain network. It will be the only best option and Hyperledger will be equipped with all possible working technologies of that time. For example, currently it is being added with “Kubernetes Support for Fabric”.

Please help us in welcoming all our interns! It is our hope that they continue to be valued contributors in the Hyperledger community well after their summer internships. You might even want to join them working on the 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: [email protected]

 

 

 

May 31
0

Consensus 2017 is a Wrap!

By | Events, Finance, Healthcare, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

The Hyperledger team (and 40 of our members!) spent a good amount of time in New York for CoinDesk’s annual Consensus conference last week. It was a great event with tons of excitement and enthusiasm around blockchain and its many applications. Attendees were from all walks of life – from developers to architects to financial services professionals to healthcare specialists to investors – all trying to better understand the best and most practical use cases of the technology.
The event kicked off the weekend before with the Building Blocks Hackathon at 30 Rockefeller where many of the world’s top blockchain developers vied to build the next killer smart contract app. Participants could build on top of any blockchain protocol: bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger or otherwise. And through various sponsor challenges, they were encouraged to leverage the software and support made available by our world-class mentors in order to deliver projects.

Hyperledger was a sponsor of the event. The Hashed Health development team ended up winning the Hyperledger challenge, which was to create a game using any of the Hyperledger frameworks. 

(Winning team of the Hyperledger hackathon challenge and Hyperledger Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf)

Jonathan Levi, an active Hyperledger community member and the founder of HACERA, won 2 hackathon challenges using Hyperledger technology. They won the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance challenge and they were one of the winners of the Microsoft challenge. They called their solution Dutchess – a secure decentralized Chess on the blockchain that allows players to use ETH to pay for an unfair advantage in a sealed-bid Dutch auction. The entry highlighted Jonathan’s and HACERA’s approach of integrating multiple permissioned & public chains.

Dutchess incorporated:

  • Public Ethereum accounts used to transfer money to a sealed-bid Dutch auction
  • Confidential transactions using Solidity on Quorum, deployed on Microsoft Azure
  • A permissioned and public identity chain (Sovrin) for registering identity tokens
  • Hyperledger Indy for implementing secure verifiable claims
  • Hyperledger Sawtooth for transaction processing and validation

The result was a mini HACERA-like workflow that provided secure, auditable, privacy preserving, that prevents impersonation, relying on self-sovereign identity and offers a non-repudiation guarantee – with a playable fun game of Chess on a blockchain.

Early Monday, the Hyperledger team then set up shop on the 6th floor of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Crowds of attendees stopped by each day to learn more about the technology.  

 

At the booth several member companies gave demos on different Hyperledger projects including Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Iroha. Cloudsoft demonstrated Deploying Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes with Cloudsoft AMP. IBM showed Connect a Cloud, connecting organizations together on Hyperledger Fabric using hosted cloud providers of choice. Soramitsu ran a KYC/user identity demo of Hyperledger Iroha/Android app and video, and Byacco, a local digital currency currently in use at University of Aizu in Fukushima, Japan. IntellectEU together with their customer Telindus (Proximus Group) explained streamlined asset transactions through reconciliation, matching and resolution among multiple parties.

Hyperledger also hosted a Roundtable on Monday on its distributed ledger technologies, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Iroha, each technology had end users speak to their different use cases. Kelly Olsen from Intel spoke to Sawtooth and his user, Pokitdok CTO, Ted Tanner weighed in on how they are utilizing Sawtooth in their healthcare blockchain solution. Makoto Takemiya, CEO, co-founder, Soramitsu discussed Hyperledger Iroha as a blockchain framework for mobile applications and Soichiro Takagi, from the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan shared his experience with the technology.

(Hyperledger roundtable participants: Makoto Takemiya, Soichiro Takagi, Kelly Olsen & Ted Tanner)

In addition to the robust line-up of Hyperledger activities in the main Consensus program and on the show floor, Hyperledger hosted a series of talks that ran all day Monday and Tuesday in the Hyperledger Mini Summit room. Attendees interested in how to best collaborate and get involved in the Hyperledger initiatives and learn where they can provide the most value had their bases covered in Monday’s “Meet the Hyperledger community” sessions. Speakers included the new technical staff, and diverse representation from the Technical Steering and Marketing committees, Governing Board, Identity Working Group and our fearless leader, Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger’s executive director.

In Tuesday’s Hyperledger Mini Summit sessions, members dove a bit deeper into the impact of blockchain technologies on their businesses with field reports on how they are using Hyperledger to solve their business objectives. Attendees heard technical insights from Norbloc on the KYC process, IntellectEU together with their customer Telindus (Proximus Group) on streamlined asset transactions, as well as Cloudsoft on deploying and managing global blockchain networks.

Our members reinforced that blockchain is not only impacting business on a global scale, but also across industries through blockchain talks from Huawei on telecom, Daimler on the industrial enterprise, Deloitte on regulation, Energy Blockchain Labs on reversing China carbon emissions, and a panel of speakers from Accenture, BanQu and Leading Directions on blockchain for good applications.

Hyperledger hosted three different panels on Tuesday moderated by Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf and Security Maven, Dave Huseby. Those panels were “The Role of Open Source in Blockchain,” “Blockchain in the Wild, PoCs, Pilots & Deployments” and “Security, Privacy and the Enterprise Blockchain.”

(The Role of Open Source in Blockchain panelists: Dan Middleton, Intel, Casey Kuhlman, Monax, Makoto Takemiya, Soramitsu & Amber Baldet, J.P. Morgan)

 

(Blockchain in the Wild, PoCs, Pilots & Deployments panelists: Jesse Chenard, MonetaGo, Ashwin Kumar, Deutsche Boerse, Ram Komarraju, CLS Group, Corey Todaro, Hashed Health & David Treat, Accenture)

The panels were very well attended and there was great discussion on all three topics. It was most interesting that identity on the blockchain turned out to be the main topic of conversation during the security and privacy panel. And on that note, we’re excited with Hyperledger Indy just recently getting accepted into incubation under Hyperledger. Indy provides tools, libraries, and reusable components for providing digital identities rooted on blockchains.

(Security, Privacy and the Enterprise Blockchain panelists: Justin Newton, Netki, Drummond Reed, Sovrin Foundation, Jeff Garzik, Bloq & Astyanax Kanakakis, Norbloc)

We ended Consensus with a member party atop a NYC hotel rooftop. It was such a pleasure to see everyone and we are extremely grateful for all the support our community has provided around this event and overall. We’re looking forward to next year’s event – we hope that you can join us!
For those interested in additional information about Hyperledger technologies please reach out to: [email protected] As always, we encourage developers to join our efforts via GitHub, Rocket.Chat the wiki or the mailing lists. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter.

May 31
0

Hyperledger’s Monthly Technical Update

By | Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As our incubated projects continue to mature, we’d like to update the community monthly on the progress we make. Below are May updates on Hyperledger projects.

Hyperledger Explorer

  • We are currently understanding the Node SDK provided by Hyperledger Fabric
  • Created basic project setup with front end using popular react.js framework
  • Added two new developers and are busy getting them up to speed on contributing to Hyperledger Explorer

Hyperledger Burrow

  • We moved and renamed former eris-db v0.16 into Hyperledger Burrow v0.16 (logistics) to initiate Hyperledger Burrow
    • We upgraded Tendermint v0.8.0 (Burrow v0.16) to Tendermint v0.9.2 (on develop Burrow v0.17)
    • Initial design work completed on user interaction with Hyperledger Burrow’s EVM from within Hyperledger family, specifically looking at Hyperledger Composer for UI/UX (replacing monax/legacy-contracts.js) and Hyperledger Indy for identity
  • Started collaboration with Hyperledger Sawtooth to use Hyperledger Burrow’s EVM as a transaction processor on the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform

Hyperledger Cello

  • Added new user-dashboard to support multi-tenant
  • K8s support has been discussed and will make documentation on jira
  • Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 support script are submitted
  • Summer intern students were trained to get familiar with the project

Hyperledger Composer

  • Made great progress with our move to Hyperledger:
    • Moved all source code and builds into GitHub and Travis CI under the Hyperledger organization
    • Moved the main website and documentation to https://hyperledger.github.io/composer
    • Substantial rebranding effort of main website, documentation, and playground
  • Delivered support for deploying Hyperledger Composer to Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 alpha:
    • New version of the getting started guide and related documentation
    • Continuing to keep in step with the latest Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 changes
  • Delivered connection profile and identity management support in the playground:
    • Use connection profiles to connect to Hyperledger Fabric v0.6 and v1.0.
    • Use identity management to switch between different Blockchain identities.
    • Removed and deprecated the old, superseded UI
  • Upgraded the Angular generator to generate Angular 4 applications.
  • Began work on being able to model, publish, and subscribe to business events.

Hyperledger Fabric

  • We agreed to a feature/code freeze at the Hackfest in DC, and selected co-release managers for the v1.0 release: Chris Ferris (IBM) and Jonathan Levi (Hacera).
  • At the hackfest, we also discussed and agreed on some changes to the development process proposed by Dave Huseby, which we will implement as a function of creating the release branch for v1.0.0-alpha2.
  • The TL;DR: of the proposal is that we will manage change through feature branches that will be merged into a development branch to undergo the full gauntlet of testing, and reverted if they still need work. Once the development branch has merged the set of features agreed for a release, the develop branch will be fast forward merged into the release branch (also the master branch), tested once more, and then published. The release/master branch which will always have the most recent stable release as the default on GitHub (as opposed to the head of development as is the case today).
  • Hyperledger Fabric added three new maintainers to help keep reviews up with the pace of change requests.
  • The rate of bug fixing has consistently outpaced reporting for the past 3 weeks, with in excess of 50 defects resolved per week.
  • The unit test coverage has seen steady improvement, now more than 70% (it had been 61%) with many key areas of the code at 100%. The integration test framework is taking shape and we expect to have regular testing (daily, performance/scale and long running) operational shortly.
  • Maintainers cut a v1.0.0-alpha2 release the week of May 8

Hyperledger Indy

  • Hyperledger Indy team is currently planning Jira migration from Sovrin to Hyperledger and working on configuration post-Jira Upgrade
  • Planning migration of code from Sovrin GitHub to Hyperledger GitHub
  • The team is identifying participants for Healthcare, Performance and Scaling WGs as well as collaborators for Hyperledger Burrow and Hyperledger Composer

Hyperledger Iroha

Hyperledger Sawtooth

  • Hyperledger Sawtooth graduated to Active status, announced at Consensus
  • Good hacking at the DC Hackfest, getting started integrating the Hyperledger Burrow EVM and Hyperledger Sawtooth.
  • On track for 0.8 feature complete (one condition for 1.0 release this summer).
    • Updated PoET to Hyperledger Sawtooth 0.8 architecture
    • Implemented PoET Z, C, & K admission policies
    • Threaded peering code
    • Added docker compose features and docs
    • Automated binary package and docker images
    • Improved serial scheduler to take advantage of new context manager functionality
    • Implemented client-side Javascript SDK (Transaction/Batch creation)
    • Implemented Go SDK
    • C++ SDK in progress

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: [email protected].

Happy coding!