Finance Archives – Hyperledger

Apr 29

MemberPass® is Gaining Adoption in Credit Unions

By Julie Esser, Bonifii Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Indy, Identity

Financial fraud isn’t anything new, and the extent of the crime can vary significantly. Forty-seven percent (47%) of US consumers experienced financial identity theft fraud in the past two years—in fact, every 15 seconds a financial fraud incident occurs. COVID-19 has only accelerated the growth of financial fraud. Losses due to identity theft increased by 42% from 2019 to 2020 primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent study published by the Aite Group.

Today, there are multiple authentication steps in place in financial institutions thanks to the steady increase in cybercrimes. These high-tech frauds take assets from financial institutions and deliver a bit of reputation risk to their public image. Research demonstrates that consumers expect their financial institution to take active steps to mitigate financial risks. Consumers want protection, but they also want a fast and efficient user experience. Too often, each delivery channel is a silo with its own authentication method:

For example,

The call center uses knowledge-based questions
The lobby and drive-up require a driver’s license or other physical forms of identification
Online banking access calls for a username and password plus, often a two-factor authentication.

And consumers want more control over their personal data. In late September 2020, we commissioned a nationally representative survey to over 1,000 adults about their perceptions of MemberPass, Bonifii’s digital credential solution that enables financial institutions to instantly verify financial credentials seamlessly across all consumer contact points in a highly secure and privacy-preserving manner.

There were lots of noteworthy findings:

62% of credit union members said they would sign up for MemberPass if it were available.
56% of respondents who are satisfied with their financial institution would use MemberPass.
67% of consumers would feel more positive toward their financial institution if MemberPass was offered.
50% of consumers would sign up for MemberPass today if a security breach had impacted their account or if they had been identity theft victims.

There is a better way for financial institutions and consumers!

Since its launch in early 2020, MemberPass has been gaining momentum among credit unions and with the members they serve. MemberPass is the financial industry’s first digital credential solution that enables credit unions to instantly verify financial credentials seamlessly across all consumer member contact points. Because MemberPass is built on Hyperledger Indy, credit union members can retain full control of their private personal information. The credential is secure and flexible. It allows the member to reveal only the data necessary for a given transaction. Best of all, it’s impossible to hack or steal.

So far this year, we have seven active MemberPass implementations with another ten more credit unions planning their deployments in the next six months. Our active programs have gotten MemberPass credentials into the hands of about 20,000 members to date.

After we make a program sale, we continue to work closely with our credit union clients. We present each of them with a personalized copy of the MemberPass “Jump Start” playbook. This is a comprehensive toolkit to help the credit union increase the level of member adoption of MemberPass.

The playbook contains product benefits, consumer need identification tools, call center and drive-through workflow models, marketing strategies, incentive programs, and more. Our adoption goal is to get between 5-10% member adoption within six months of the “go live” date.

The demand for decentralized identity among financial institutions is only getting stronger—and, best of all, no one but the consumer owns his or her personal data!

Cover image: Hloom via Flickr / CC BY-SA, 401(K) 2013

Apr 28

Love0

BondEvalue Upends the Global Bond Market Using Hyperledger Sawtooth

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As many industries struggled to find their footing amid the aggressive headwinds caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the global bond market has managed to thrive. With near zero interest rates implemented worldwide to ease the financial burdens caused by the coronavirus, the demand for bonds soared.

But for those interested in investing in international bonds, the bond markets in Asia and Europe are particularly hard to break into for two reasons: high investment thresholds and lack of electronic infrastructure.

In the international bond markets, the minimum investment is $200,000. Typically, only those who have $5 million or above can afford to diversify their portfolio, and they pour about one-third of their wealth into bonds.

But there are roughly 500 million people who have assets that range from $100,000 to $1 million and are eager to expand their portfolio. However, they find the bond market impenetrable because of the investment barrier.

For those who have the means to break into the international bond market, it can still be a challenge as trading in the bond markets still happens over the phone and involves a number of intermediaries, with everyone taking a cut.

To make managing bonds faster, more accessible, and more technologically advanced, the team at BondEvalue recognized the need to upend the global bond market and create a modern infrastructure. In November 2019, BondEvalue launched the BondbloX Bond Exchange, replacing the traditional over-the-counter trading experience with the world’s first fully regulated blockchain-based bond exchange that allows consumers to instantaneously and transparently trade bonds in smaller denominations of $1,000 each.

Fully licensed and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a Recognized Market Operator, the BondbloX Bond Exchange operates under a strategic partnership with Northern Trust, which is the exclusive custodian for the exchange. Together they deliver integrated asset servicing and digital ownership of fractionalized fixed income bonds on a blockchain network.

Using depository receipts as a model, traditional bonds are brought into the BondbloX Bond Exchange through designated market makers or a member participant from a secondary market. A designated custodian on the exchange (in this case, Northern Trust) confirms receipt of the bond into the blockchain, which then triggers the bond to be divided into fractionalized BondbloX worth $1,000 each and backed one-to-one on the blockchain.

These BondbloX are then traded on the BondbloX Bond Exchange and, with the blockchain infrastructure, settlement is nearly instantaneous, occurring on a T+0 basis. So instead of waiting for the normal two-day settlement cycle for traditional bond transactions, BondbloX trades are final within seconds, reducing counterparty settlement risks for investors.

The BondEvalue team realized the only way to feed the beast of building an innovative, groundbreaking global bond exchange would be to deploy Hyperledger Sawtooth. As a modular and flexible architecture, Hyperledger Sawtooth allows developers to separate the core system from the application domain so smart contracts can specify the business rules for applications without needing to know the underlying design of the core system.

Hyperledger worked up with BondEvalue on a case study that details how the exchange works, the technology and governance behind it and plans to scale to include more participants in more markets.

Read the full case study here.

Feb 03

Love1

Wecan Comply: How to use the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain for real-time compliance auditing

By Vincent Pignon, Omar El Mansour and Justine Latta Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric

The state of compliance today

Compliance today is hampered by a real lack of coordination between its various players. Indeed, each actor uses its own processes and tools. Some have invested in technological innovation while others continue to use more traditional methods. The situation is such that nothing has yet been really proposed to facilitate compliance exchanges between external asset managers and their custodian banks.

The administrative workload is heavy and is increasing: the list grows daily, with a new regulatory alert in financial services alone issued every seven minutes according to Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence. And it is estimated that 15 to 25% of a company’s revenue is wasted because of poor data quality and management says Experian plc. Indeed, information is, most of the time, structured internally but exchanged externally by mail, email, phone or fax in a very inefficient and unsecured way. For EAMs, onboarding at a custodian bank therefore requires several hours of work: the announcement process carried out at all the custodian banks, which can go up to more than 50 hours, is still very manual today.

In addition, the annual review (partial or complete) of the relationship with the bank is an important process for the bank and requires administrative verification work that can take several months.

Compliance efficiency thanks to blockchain

The administrative burden caused by the duplication of compliance processes will be considerably reduced, thanks to blockchain. It will make it possible to digitize and streamline the management of information, thus avoiding many errors. Bockchain technology will enable independent managers to implement much more reliable, smooth and secure operating procedures.

The Wecan Comply platform makes it possible to digitize and standardise the information exchanged between financial players in order to facilitate and streamline exchanges between banks and independent asset managers in a secure manner. The objective is to enable financial players to pool their resources on non-competitive and non-differentiated subjects in order to improve auditability and, eventually, to automate it. This will not be available immediately, but the Wecan Comply platform will soon be linked to official registers. Managers will thus be able to ensure that their custodian banks have direct access to all kinds of official documents, without having to worry about collecting and processing them. By skipping these verification steps, they will be able to save time while limiting the risk of fraud.

The Blockchain Association for Finance: a unique compliance network

Wecan Comply is an ambitious project aimed at optimizing compliance processes. It is the first blockchain infrastructure addressed to Private Banks, thus significantly opening up the prospects of use cases. Several banks and independent asset managers have already joined this unique network: Pictet Group, Lombard Odier Group, Edmond de Rothschild, REYL Group, Hyposwiss Private Bank Genève SA, Gonet, Banque Cramer, CAPITALIUM Wealth Management, PLEION Gestion de fortune, and Fransad Gestion SA. In order to carry out this project, Wecan Group has created an industry standard that meets the best regulatory requirements set by regulators. With a view to ensuring neutrality and the proper functioning of the platform, the members of the network have created an association: the Blockchain Association for Finance.

Systematic and real-time compliance status

The platform allows EAMs and banks users to track and receive real-time alerts for all changes to ensure the compliance of documents and information shared. It monitors, reports and analyzes events and changes while ensuring the security of the environment thanks to Hyperledger Fabric. This solution enhances the security by allowing the user to instantly know who made a specific change, when, and from which entity. Since the data stored is authenticated by multiple institutions and continually up to date, the compliance offices have a real-time reporting of the compliance status and can share it at any time to the management or the external auditors.

Custodian banks save time by accessing in one place standard and structured information coming from their EAM. And they have a real-time compliance status linked to all data. Wecan Comply solution drives efficiency and cost effectiveness, reducing the painful administrative work. Banks are processing top-notch quality of data since all information is validated by other banks of the network. All exchanges are digital, onboardings are faster and there is a real-time auditability of all modifications.

Why we choose Hyperledger Fabric

Wecan Comply uses Hyperledger Fabric, an open source blockchain platform for enterprises hosted by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric enables private actors to exchange information while retaining ownership of their data. Each party is clearly identified, and every transaction is authenticated, authorized, validated and tracked.

Thanks to Hyperledger Fabric there is no central administrator: each bank and EAM controls its own information in a fully encrypted and secured network. As a solution provider, Wecan Comply does not have access to the information exchanged. It is only powering the network. Hyperledger Fabric offers a high level of security by ensuring that data access is only made after the user’s private key has been verified by the system. This eliminates the chance of unauthorized access and gives individuals greater control over their information. In addition, the platform is certified by a zero-knowledge proof technology that allows to protect the privacy of all users and to decentralize data control and sharing.

The world of compliance tomorrow

The union of financial players within a network offers good prospects for development. In particular, data exchange among custodian banks, regulatory bodies and auditors will benefit from significant gains in efficiency.

The next step for Wecan Comply is the connection to the official registers that will create a real ecosystem around compliance and thus release all the value of the platform. Wecan Comply was initiated with and for the actors of the financial industry. Our ambition is then to apply this method to all regulated professions where there are standards in order to guarantee a monitoring and audit of compliance in real time.

Dec 16

Love0

Examining DLT Solutions for Trade and Finance, with a China Focus

By Eugenio Reggianini, Business Development Manager, CarbonBlue Innovations Limited; Member, Hyperledger Trade Finance & Capital Market Special Interest Groups Blog, Finance, Special Interest Group

2020 will be remembered as the year the world was impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, with severe health, economic and societal consequences for many. The lockdown experience many nations faced was a chance for some to rethink and reflect on the events that were changing the lives of billions of people.

As a volunteer with both the Hyperledger Capital Markets and Trade Finance Special Interest Groups, I took this opportunity to research developments in Distributed Ledger Technology in China. After the turmoil of this pandemic, I believe a large-scale adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology is indeed possible and could lead to the development of ecosystems that will contribute to a better future for our society.

I captured my research in a paper that highlights the efforts at the national level in China to embrace the integration of DLT into a comprehensive ecosystem that could potentially bring value for the world, focusing particularly on finance industry applications. Read on for some of the highlights from the paper:

China is building the first DLT interoperability project within a cross-cloud, cross-framework, cross-chain architecture over a number of smart cities in China and in strategic locations internationally. This project, called the Blockchain Service Network or BSN, aims to connect the different DLTs of public entities, private corporations and permissionless-permissioned chains.

The vision is to create a cross-industry DLT ecosystem that could be integrated by IoT and AI-powered smart cities to totally reshape data management practices and society.

Focusing on finance applications, China aims to complete the digitalization of assets and transactions for the digital transformation of financial markets. The People’s Bank of China is taking the lead by issuing technical and operational standards for the industry. It is currently running national pilot projects based on assets digitalization by the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the so-called Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), a solution that could potentially replace M0 “cash” in 10-15 years as a ground layer for financial operations.

The aim of the Hyperledger Capital Markets Special Interest Group (CMSIG) is to focus on the transformation of capital markets through the use of blockchain technologies, specifically the DLTs in the Hyperledger greenhouse. Hyperledger Fabric and its derivatives are core components of BSN. Capital markets are a way to connect investors and borrowers to facilitate the production of goods and services. Such markets are venues where creation of tradeable representations of assets of various duration and the safe exchange of these assets through the medium of a fungible, legal, safe asset like a currency takes place. Provenance and durable claims on the assets are important and so is interoperability between the assets through the medium of a safe currency.

BSN and DCEP, by integrating a national digital marketplace, tackle friction inherent in these processes. The effects will be felt far beyond China. Non-China markets will have to use BSN and DCEP to engage with China markets. Reverberations from such a vast socio-technical transformation will reach even those who are not directly engaged with China. The Hyperledger CMSIG is following these developments and has hosted several presentations on BSN and DCEP. The paper on DLTs focusing on China is an important addition to the corpus, contributing to our understanding of China’s blockchain stack and its strategic implications for Trade Finance and Capital Markets.

The People’s Bank of China is also leading a national project involving Distributed Ledger Technology for trade and supply chain finance, the national harmonization of account receivables, financial bill rediscount, tax filing and international trade information collection. The pilot project is working in strategic locations supported by special regulations and sandboxes applications. Key municipalities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, are developing long-term DLT strategic plans, integrating free trade areas with the goal to support a national pilot project application at a larger scale.

Trade and supply chain finance, especially in cross border operations, represents a perfect case scenario where BSN and DCEP, despite them being separate projects, could potentially find common ground for integration based on the high level of internationalization and the large number of players involved in transactions. International trade is a fragmented environment made up of banks, insurers, logistics and transportation operators, buyers and sellers: it may greatly benefit from inclusive projects like BSN and DCEP.

One of the areas the Hyperledger Trade Finance Special Interest Group (TFSIG) focuses on is technical and business operational practices for achieving interoperability and the creation of a comprehensive ecosystem between networks. Hyperledger Project Cactus could help achieve this higher purpose, standing as a turnkey solution for a new approach to “DLT-based ecosystem projects.”

To conclude, BSN could be seen as an institutional marketplace for DLT applications in different areas, where each solution will find its place and challenge each other for a new “network” of DLT cloud, framework and applications. In the long run, BSN can be considered a pivotal strategic architecture, capable of reaching businesses stretching from China to overseas strategic locations, under a secure and distributed network. Financial DLT national projects therefore represent a way to safely drive overseas investments in terms of political orientation and economic accountability over the Digital Silk Road.

For more details and updates, please see the full DLT solutions for trade and finance – China focus paper on the TFSIG and CMSIG wikis.

Trade Finance SIG: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/TFSIG/DLT+solutions+for+trade+and+finance+-+China+Focus

Capital Market SIG: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/CMSIG/DLT+solutions+for+trade+and+finance+-+China+focus

Written by:
Eugenio Reggianini, Business Development Manager, CarbonBlue Innovations Limited; Member, Hyperledger Trade Finance & Capital Market Special Interest Groups

Curated by:
Andrea Frosinini, freelance trade finance consultant; Chair, Hyperledger Trade Finance Special Interest Group

Vipin Bharathan, Technical Strategist and Founder, dlt.nyc; Chair, Hyperledger Capital Markets SIG

Dec 03

Love0

An innovative blockchain solution powered by Hyperledger Fabric helps banks implement DeFI services in days

By Pavel Lvov, CEO, Smart Block Laboratory Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric

Digitization is a megatrend that has already transformed many industries – and now it’s banking’s turn. But digital banking is about more than just rebranding or adding a mobile app: it requires highly personalized transactions. In this sense, banks have a lot to learn from decentralized finance, or DeFI.

There are still lots of issues to solve before we can celebrate the coming of a new digital banking age:

Customers of even the same bank can’t directly interact with each other;
Cross-border transfers remain expensive and ridden with middlemen;
Bank users can’t convert fiat into crypto and back; and
New banking services take ages to develop, approve and introduce.

In DeFi, most of these problems have already been resolved. Users can lend each other money directly; earn more than 10% a year on crypto deposits; send money abroad in seconds, and much else. Banks could greatly benefit from these instruments. The problem is that developing a crypto-fiat DeFi platform from scratch is expensive and requires expertise that most banks’ IT teams simply don’t have.

Introducing Cryptoenter: a turn-key DeFi solution for banks

The way to solve this conundrum is to implement a versatile DeFi infrastructure that any bank could use out of the box. That’s exactly what Cryptoenter does: it’s a ready-to-use platform that facilitates interactions between banks and their users – as well as between users themselves, wherever they are in the world.

As soon as a financial institution integrates Cryptoenter, its customers gain access to dozens of DeFi services:

P2P lending (users issue each other loans in crypto and fiat);
Cryptocurrency/fiat wallet;
Fiat-crypto and crypto-fiat gateways;
Instant and cheap cross-border transfers (remittance fees don’t exceed $1);
Real-time value exchange;
Payment processing and acquiring;
Crowdfunding and a social network for investors;
Issuing stablecoins and new cryptocurrencies;
Interbank payments, and much else.

Essentially Cryptoenter provides a virtual banking front end and a ready system for managing customers’ fiat and crypto accounts. As long as two banks sign up as validators on Cryptoenter, their customers can interact with each other in the same way as customers of the same bank. For the financial institution, the benefits are many:

Extra revenue (charging fees on DeFi services);
Increased customer loyalty;
Expansion into new regions (branchless banking);
Easy customer acquisition.

Scalable and easy to implement

Thanks to a handy API, Cryptoenter is quick and easy to integrate into the backend and frontend of any bank. Every end customer gets a personal crypto-fiat wallet and can start using DeFi services immediately through the familiar interface. Meanwhile, the bank itself can focus on marketing instead of spending money on product development.

To ensure scaling and speed, Cryptoenter leverages Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric – the first DeFi project to do so. The platform also uses Rubicon Blockchain by Smart Block Laboratory and a number of IBM solutions, including IBM Cloud, Kubernetes, and Cloud Object Storage.

The following diagram shows the interactions within the Cryptoenter infrastructure:

According to a recent report, banks spend 72% of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems. Cryptoenter allows any bank to implement a complete DeFi system for a fraction of that budget – and enjoy all the benefits of digital banking without any additional development.

Sep 28

Love0

#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

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, 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.

Jun 29

Love6

The New York Times Recognizes Brian Behlendorf as one of the Top 10 Most Influential People in Blockchain

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Healthcare

We’re thrilled to see Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times include Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger Executive Director, in a roundup of the top 10 most influential leaders advancing blockchain technologies in the industry today.

Brian has led a life-long career in open source technology starting off as a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. Often referring to himself as the “Geek Diplomat” of Hyperledger, Brian has successfully led the effort to attract more than 235 members from all over the world, pulled in hundreds of developers to contribute code and grown the consortium to include 10 tools and frameworks over the past two years. All this has made Hyperledger the fastest growing open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation to date.

Laura Shin wrote another story in The New York Times, that explored how various industries like healthcare, government, food, supply chain management and trade finance are turning to blockchain to improve efficiencies and enable new business models. Brian Behlendorf is quoted in the article saying companies must transform and adapt their business models to leverage blockchain if they want to remain competitive.

The technology, he said, “does force them to transform in the same way that companies that were information-centered have had to transform with the rise of the internet. That same kind of thing will hit any company about transactions or about being a system of record for an industry. If they transform themselves before their competitors do it, they’ll have a future.”

The article referenced Northern Trust as an example of blockchain in production today. Northern Trust utilizes Hyperledger Fabric to automate the paper-intensive process of investing by pensions and endowments in private equity. Hyperledger technologies run in production deployments and provide real value beyond finance as well. Take for instance, PokitDok, which created a Hyperledger Sawtooth-powered platform called DokChain that manages smart contracts, resolves patient identities, controls access to personal health records, settles healthcare claims and fuels complex medical supply chains.

Another example is Change Healthcare, which last year, signed on as the first healthcare Premier member of Hyperledger. They announced their Intelligent Healthcare Network, built on Hyperledger Fabric, for claims management transparency. With it, organizations can accurately track, in real time, the status of claims submission and remittance across the complete claim.

The fact is companies from small startups to large prominent tech companies are betting a chunk of their business on the future of these technologies. SAP, Oracle, GE, Amazon and Huawei announced Blockchain-as-a-Service products within the last year, all powered by Hyperledger technologies. We, at Hyperledger, proudly support this innovation.

Hyperledger’s end vision is to create the foundational infrastructure that will power enterprise distributed ledger applications and systems and allow for decentralization. And the future is looking very bright! You can check out many other projects, pilots and production deployments of Hyperledger (or add your own) via our Blockchain Showcase. You can also plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. As always, keep up with what’s new with Hyperledger on Twitter.

May 16

Love12

Hyperledger Adds Deutsche Bank as Premier Member

By Hyperledger Announcements, Finance

Leading global financial services provider joins open blockchain consortium to drive innovative solutions for customers

SAN FRANCISCO – May 16, 2018 – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry business blockchain technologies, announced today that Deutsche Bank has joined the project as a Premier member. Other Hyperledger Premier members include: Accenture, Airbus, American Express, Baidu, Change Healthcare, Cisco, Daimler, Digital Asset, DTCC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, NEC, SAP, Tradeshift and Wanda FFan Technology.

“Adding a major bank like Deutsche Bank to our list of Premier members demonstrates the value Hyperledger brings to the financial services market,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “With their help and global reach, we look forwarding to driving more global production deployments like Know Your Customer (KYC), payments, trading and others based on Hyperledger technologies.”

Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases. It is a global collaboration of more than 230 organizations including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.

“As a Premier member, we’re hoping our expertise and global network will help advance open source distributed ledger technologies and allow us to better serve the complex needs of our clients, who look to us to improve their and their trade partners’ financial endeavors,” said Jon Pearson, Head of Deutsche Bank Labs United Kingdom and Ireland.

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/.

May 31

Love9

Consensus 2017 is a Wrap!

By Hyperledger 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: info@hyperledger.org. 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.

Apr 27

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[VIDEO] Hyperledger Interviews Amber Baldet, JP Morgan

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance

We recently sat down with Amber Baldet, blockchain program lead at JP Morgan. JP Morgan is one of the Premier founding members of Hyperledger.

JP Morgan is a big supporter of open source software and was thrilled to see a community coming together around open source standard setting for blockchain and DLT. Last year, they announced work on Quorum, a privacy preserving version of Ethereum via Hyperledger’s TSC.

JP Morgan is currently exploring blockchain to discover ways of doing more complex asset transfer, while maintaining security and understanding the concept of value. Amber looks forward to seeing how their work on Quorum can be additive to the overall Hyperledger community. According to her, Blockchain tech is transformative to the financial services industry and as the largest investment bank in the world, JP Morgan is committed to shaping the future of the technology.

Watch the full interview below: