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Hyperledger Besu

Dec 06
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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Support Clique for Hyperledger Besu

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Labs, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

The Hyperledger Mentorship Program is a structured hands-on learning opportunity for new developers who may otherwise lack the opportunity to gain exposure to Hyperledger open source development and entry to the technical community. These Mentorship Spotlights highlight the work done by the Mentors and the Mentees as part of their program participation. Learn more here.

 

Mentorship Project Title

Support Clique Consensus for Besu on Blockchain Automation Framework

Description To support the Clique consensus for Hyperledger Besu so that BAF can be used to deploy and operate a Hyperledger Besu network with Clique consensus. This will also include upgrading BAF to support the latest stable Besu version.
Status COMPLETED 
Difficulty MEDIUM 
Additional Details Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Roshan Raut

Pune Vidhyarthi Griha’s College of Engineering and Technology

“This Mentorship program gave me real-world software engineering experience. I’ve learned to dig and work on a large codebase. Write production-ready code. Figure out the specific code files and documentation that is required to complete the specific task. Regular mentor meetings and discussions helped me to plan my way and complete all the tasks on time. I am thankful to my mentor for understanding my capabilities and mentoring me throughout the program. Also, I’m thankful to the entire Hperledger community for such an amazing program. Open source is interesting, and I would like to be part of it even after the mentorship program.”

Mentor

Sownak Roy

Accenture

“Learner is one of my top strengths, and I also like to share the knowledge with other people. That is why I joined this program as a mentor. Also, I wanted to have more people contributing to open-source projects. The main highlight was when my mentee completed all the tasks and was able to deploy a Besu network. The most significant growth for my mentee was his ability to spin up a Cloud environment and then execute Ansible on the server. Lessons learned for me were to be patient and to explore multiple options of the execution environment. The most rewarding part of this experience is the knowledge that there is at least one additional person who will now contribute to the betterment of an open-source code.”

A special thanks to the Hyperledger member companies for funding this important program. To learn more about our Hyperledger Mentorship Program and how you can participate in our next cohort, head over to our program overview page on the Hyperledger wiki.

Oct 28
Love2

A Look at Hyperledger-Powered Financial Services Solutions in Action

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Firefly

It is #HyperledgerFinTech month, so we are spotlighting solutions where Hyperledger is at work across the finance service market. Read on for details on applications and solutions leveraging a mix of Hyperledger technologies to invent and reinvent a range of services, including eKYC, insurance claims processing, accounts reconciliation, specialty trades and more:

AnaMeen

AnaMeen is a multi-organizational eKYC solution from Ahli Fintech involving Jordan Ahli Bank and Zain Jordan, a mobile telecom provider. This eKYC-as-a-Service, built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform (OBP), aims to remove the friction in the current KYC and onboarding process challenges faced by all banks and financial institutions and to provide greater financial inclusion for all Jordanians. It delivers an enhanced and secure customer experience, with a 10-day account opening process now made instantaneous. Ahli Fintech leverages augmented intelligence and deep learning technologies to verify the identity of the AnaMeen users’ government-issued identity documents. It collects the four-signature specimens of the users and verifies the client signature on file during a verification video-call with an AnaMeen agent. Customers verify their information and their identity is matched based on their facial biometrics during the video-call. Each customer’s identity is uploaded to a smart contract on OBP to verify and endorse it, storing it in the “Meen World” immutable ledger distributed across the permissioned blockchain network. The solution, which is powered Hyperledger Fabric, enables self-sovereign instant KYC data sharing, with full control in the users’ hands in full compliance with international data protection and data privacy standards. It is accessible via the “Meen World” eKYC-as-a-Service partner portal, where entities can request access and users can grant access in order to use the services provided by these entities, including instant digital onboarding with subscribed banks.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative is the risk management and insurance industry’s first enterprise-level blockchain consortium that brings together experts and developers to advance insurance-specific use cases via Canopy 3.0, a custom blockchain architecture running on Kaleido that leverages Hyperledger FireFly.

A major source of inefficiency in the life & annuity insurance industry is that life insurers lack a single source of truth for processing death benefits and claims. For all participants, the multiple handoffs between systems and people increase time, cost, and risk.

The Mortality Monitor project, a blockchain-based technology solution led by RiskStream Collaborative, offers a single source of digital decedent information required to process a claim. Instant notification helps carriers proactively identify potential deaths more quickly, reducing the burden on the beneficiary, and shortening the cycle time.

NPLUS 

Sydema has implemented NPLUS, a digital and independent platform that makes the exchange of non-performing loans (NPLs) simple, reliable and secure. This transaction platform provides an exchange where banks and investors can trade NPLs based on standardized data templates, which helps to increase transparency and liquidity in this process. It also reduces the wide bid-ask spreads on NPLs, thus contributing to a faster clean-up of bank balance sheets. NPLUS uses an independent blockchain solution developed by Mangrovia on the Hyperledger Fabric-based Oracle Blockchain Platform so that the tracking and storage of loan portfolio and collateral data is referenceable on the marketplace and NPL trading operations are transparent and persistent. 

Public Mint

Public Mint is the first fiat-native public blockchain that allows people, companies, applications and banks to interact in frictionless new ways around money. Prior to Public Mint, transactions required banking and exchange off-ramps, meaning there was no such solution offered by payment providers that was blockchain compatible or that enabled instant settlement in fiat. Public Mint, which is built on Hyperledger Besu, is an open blockchain blended with an API platform that allows fiat money to get all the benefits of a cryptocurrency, minus the volatility and complexity. People and businesses from all over the world are free to build all kinds of fiat-based applications and services on top of Public Mint, fueled by money as we know it – without the limitations of traditional banking rails.

SECURUS

Supermoney has introduced SECURUS, a specialist insurance product that addresses key issues in insurance accounts reconciliation between the customers, brokers, insurer, and re-insurers. It is an end-to-end finance and accounts reconciliation solution incorporating underwriting and claims functions. Using tokenization to create and manage accounting of real-world payment flows across multiple siloed systems, the Oracle Blockchain Platform-based network covers MGAs, brokers, and underwriters. It enables ingestion of data from multiple systems, provides Bordereau reports on money flows related to premiums paid or claims with real-time updates, and partner contracts, including commission rates. Built with Hyperledger Fabric at its core, SECURUS significantly reduces the effort and cost of manual reconciliation and avoids human errors or fraud impacting regulatory compliance, reinsurance accounting and profitability.

Symbridge

Symbridge is a blockchain-based digital asset exchange for institutional and accredited investors. Built on Hyperledger Fabric’s open-source protocol, Symbridge’s advanced technology leverages the enhanced security, immutability, and externally-verifiable state integrity of blockchain and combines it with a high-performance trading environment.  The core advantages are better transparency, tighter security, greater accuracy, reduced cost and more efficient trading. Building on Hyperledger Fabric allows Symbridge to have a decentralized validation network without sacrificing performance. Learn more about our validation network powered by Hyperledger Fabric. 

TradeAssets

TradeAssets is a digital platform for banks that automates the process of trade finance risk origination and distribution. It enables institutions to buy and sell bank risk assets while retaining some of the bilateral aspects of their current process. KrypC has helped TradeAssets implement a Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain in its online portal for securing assets. The portal is now live and provides a single point of access for the sale and purchase of assets. Banks can communicate to a large ecosystem of connected institutions to efficiently match the appetite of sellers with buyers. The entire process is quick and convenient, and all communications are secured through the portal.

TradeAssets provides robust security, complete transparency, and immutable trust and consensus between all parties.

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.

Cover image by Bicanski on Pixnio

Oct 01
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Ledger Leopard Uses Hyperledger Besu to Power a Scale-Up’s New Digital Approach to RTI Tracking

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Member Case Study, Supply Chain

Most of the products we use and consume every day are transported on Returnable Transport Items (RTI). Durable and reusable, RTIs like crates, pallets and containers allow producers to move goods efficiently and sustainably. However, tracking RTIs is often a logistical nightmare. There are billions of palettes circling around the world, and trillions of total RTIs on the move. 

When Milou Klooster joined her family’s Netherlands-based smoked fish company, Vishandel Klooster, she soon discovered how much time, money, and energy her team was wasting on tracking RTIs. When she searched for a solution to this problem, she found there wasn’t any.

She resigned from the company and partnered with consultant Yves du Bois to develop a digital approach to the problem. Together, they founded RTI Blockchain. Their aim: a reliable app that connects all members of the supply chain together in one dashboard and provides a real time overview of the status of their RTIs.

Working with blockchain-as-a-service company Ledger Leopard, they developed the RTI Dashboard—a simple and reliable way to manage load carrier administration. Using blockchain technology, the RTI Dashboard gives poolers, suppliers, shippers, and receivers real time insights on their RTI data and enables them to share information privately and transparently. Every link in the supply chain is connected, and the interface is as intuitive as mobile banking.

When it came time to consider a platform, the Ledger Leopard team first considered Ethereum Liberty because it allows for private transactions. Then they considered Hyperledger Fabric. They also considered a combination of Ethereum and Hyperledger.

Ultimately, they chose Hyperledger Besu, an open source Ethereum client for developing enterprise applications that need secure, high-performance transaction processing in a private network.

One key goal was making sure the RTI Dashboard was as easy and intuitive as online banking. Users don’t need to know anything about blockchain to use it. Registration for all users is free. There is no subscription fee, no maintenance and support fees, no cost whatsoever for users. Senders pay per item they ship over the platform at a rate of 0.0005 euros per item.

Once a company registers in RTI Dashboard, they can invite their partners to join with a link. Once the partner clicks on the link, they’re invited to explore the platform and how it works, all at no charge.

RTI Blockchain suggests users start small. “Take one supplier and use RTI Dashboard for all transactions. Once they see what the system can do for them, they’re more willing to move their entire RTI administration process to the system,” says co-founder Yves du Bois.

Hyperledger worked with RTI Blockchain and Ledger Leopard on a case study that details the goals and approach for building this solution, the growing feature set that users are helping to shape and the next opportunities the start-up is eyeing for this dashboard. 

Read the full case study here. For more details, tune into the Wednesday, October 20, discussion with Olivier Rikken of Ledger Leopard on supply chain traceability.

Sep 27
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Maintainers from four Hyperledger projects to serve as code contribution guides during AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Cacti, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Labs

Hyperledger is once again sponsoring the annual AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration as a way of supporting leaders and future women technologists in our global community. Hyperledger and the Linux Foundation are committed to supporting women-led initiatives centered around recruitment and engagement like AnitaB.org.

This year, Hyperledger is putting its resources behind Open Source Day (OSD), an all-day hackathon for participants of all skill levels to learn about open source while contributing to projects designed to solve real world problems. OSD will be held October 1 as part of this year’s Grace Hopper Celebrations (vGHC). 

During OSD, the women taking part will spend the day diving into the open source world to level up their skills and start contributing code. Participants will work in groups and with the mentors for hands-on learning, tailored to their experience level. 

Hyperledger is an official Open Source Partner Project for OSD and is teaming with maintainers from four Hyperledger projects to introduce participants to its diverse ecosystem. Maintainers from these projects will on hand as guides to both the Hyperledger technologies and the code contribution process:

  • Hyperledger Besu, an Ethereum client designed to be enterprise-friendly for both public and private permissioned network use cases;
  • Hyperledger Cactus, a blockchain integration tool designed to allow users to securely integrate different blockchains; 
  • Hyperledger Indy, a framework that provides tools, libraries, and reusable components for providing digital identities rooted on blockchains or other distributed ledgers; and
  • Firefly, a Hyperledger Lab, a multiparty system for enterprise data flows, powered by blockchain.

For each of these projects, the maintainers have compiled an array of pull requests or tasks that are tagged as “Good First Issues” that participants can tackle as their initial code contributions to Hyperledger. These triaged, non-documentation requests include everything from bug fixes to enhancements to security plug-ins. For those who want to challenge themselves or move deeper into a project, the Hyperledger Cactus list is broken down based on level of experience:

  • Level 100 – Introductory
  • Level 200 – Intermediate
  • Level 300 – Advanced
  • Level 400 – Expert

We want to thank our maintainers Anastasia Lalamentik (FireFly), Grace Hartley (Besu), Justin Florentine (Besu), Linlu Liu (FireFly), Nicko Guyer (FireFly), Peter Somogyvar (Cactus), Renata Toktar (Indy), and Tracy Kuhrt (Cactus) for offering their time and expertise to OSD. They will play a vital role in welcoming the Grace Hopper community into the world of open source and setting them up for success as contributors to Hyperledger and other projects. 

Jul 19
Love1

Hyperledger Global Forum Highlights: CBDCs, programmable money and interoperability – part II

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Global Forum

As we covered in Part I of this series, CBDC and other payment projects are moving quickly from prototypes to pilots and beyond with some well known projects already in production. As CBDCs and other cross border payment use cases mature, central banks continue to partner with the private sector from small to big companies to accelerate and innovate, and the Hyperledger open source community is at the forefront of the most public CBDC projects.

At this year’s Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF), those on the front lines of CBDC deployments and the development of critical underlying platforms and technologies presented a mix of talks about requirements for and challenges of implementing current and future payment solutions.

Read on for some of the more technical highlights from HGF on the CBDC, programmable money and currency interoperability:

Build CBDC Platform on Hyperledger Besu – Dive in Retail CBDC’s Architecture – Charles d’Haussy, ConsenSys

In this session, attendees got an overview of the architecture of the CBDC platforms powered by Hyperledger Besu.

 

(8:16) Charles d’Haussy on selecting a CBDC platform: “We mostly recommend building platforms that have public and private capacities so it’s a perfect fit with Hyperledger Besu…we also like to build on systems which are interoperable and global…”

This engaging discussion was then followed by a deep dive from John Velissarios from Accenture into the current landscape of CBDC research and experimentation across the globe.

(26:20) James Edwards on Bakong’s impact on the Cambodian payments ecosystem: “Bakong allows users of commercial banks to take advantage of the PSP’s huge networks of over the counter agents so it has made life a lot more convenient for Cambodians and for Cambodians small businesses. It has also incentivized PSPs to develop more bank-like services, a wider range of services, and has incentivized banks to develop a wider range of PSP-like services so it is enriching competition within the Cambodian payments ecosystem…”
Other sessions of interest from Hyperledger Global Forum on the subject:

Panel: Hyperledger Contributions from IBM – Kelly Ryan, Rakesh Mohan, Chris Ferris, Arnaud Le Hors & Elli Androulaki, IBM (Sponsored by IBM)

This session explored two new Hyperledger Labs: Fabric Token SDK, which enables the creation of CBDCs, and Smart Fabric Client, which is already in use with a major European Central Bank project.

Digital Currency Interoperability With Messages – Vipin Bharathan, dlt.nyc

This discussion, led by the Hyperledger Capital Markets SIG Chair Vipin Bharathan, focused on challenges facing digital currency interoperability and took a deep look at one of the current trends in implementing interoperability: message-based interoperability.

Smart Contracts with Tokenized Fiat Currency on Sberbank’s Platform – Oleg Abdrashitov, Sberbank

This presentation was an introduction to a platform for the issuance of digital assets and smart contracts developed at Sberbank’s Blockchain Laboratory. Smart contracts settle in Sber’s stablecoin: a tokenized ruble. The platform uses Hyperledger Fabric with improvements: Smart BFT for ordering, and with localized cryptography. Transaction confidentiality is achieved via Confidential Non Fungible Tokens. Sber’s platform is scheduled to go live in 2021 for the bank’s commercial clients and will be open for developers to deploy their smart contracts and applications.

Beyond Hyperledger Global Forum

In addition to being a key topic at HGF, CBDCs and other payment innovations are regular topics for discussions and activity across the Hyperledger community. Here are some talks and events, including resources for anyone looking to take part in the CBDC Global Challenge, to check out:

  • An on-demand replay of the July 13 Singapore Fintech Festival Green Shoots Series | Global CBDC Challenge session: “An impact making opportunity not to be missed” moderated by Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer, MAS, with speakers for the IMF and World Bank as well as Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf
  • Hyperledger Capital Markets SIG talk by Saket Sinha, Global VP FSS, IBM on “CBDCs Promise and Risk : Operationalizing CBDCs”CBDCs, Promise & Risk”
  • A panel discussion from the May 26 virtual Synchronize series on CDBCs moderated by Hyperledger’s Karen Ottoni with speakers from ConsenSys, Digital Asset, SilverBank and more

How else can you get involved in this work happening at Hyperledger?

  • Join as a Hyperledger member. Our member companies are leaders in financial services and technology working on these exciting projects. Learn more about membership.
  • Participate in our open communities, like our Capital Markets SIG.
  • Deep dive into Hyperledger projects with training and certifications.
  • Attend other Hyperledger events and webinars.

 

May 26
Love1

#HyperledgerInterop: A Sampling of Production Cross-Platform Solutions and Deployments Built with Hyperledger Technologies

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth

The rapid pace of innovation in the development and deployment of blockchain technologies is creating more points of intersection for cross chain and cross application data and transaction flow. Fortunately, there is also a robust effort underway to deliver new approaches to ensuring that solutions work across platforms and protocols. Case in point: at the upcoming Hyperledger Global Forum, there will be 20 talks covering various aspects of blockchain interoperability and integration. 

Below, we take a look at a sampling of use cases where Hyperledger technologies are at play in solutions that are operating in or enabling cross-platform production deployments: 

Daml
Daml, a multi-party application platform created by Digital Asset, is widely used in distributed applications that deliver portability across a number of blockchain platforms, including Hyperledger frameworks: Besu, Fabric and Sawtooth. Recently, using Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum and a traditional Postgres database, Digital Asset demonstrated platform interoperability and open sourced the code to help CBDCs (and other applications that need to integrate with CBDCs) interoperate, making the digital currencies compatible regardless of the underlying technology. The code for this CBDC use case is available on Git Hub. Read more and watch the demo here.

Hala System’s Sentry 

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

Project Starling

Project Starling was developed to help empower organizations to securely capture, store, and verify human history. Starling represents a ground-breaking methodology in the fight against the spread of misinformation and the looming threat of deep fakes by providing open-source tools. Starling uses the latest cryptographic methods and decentralized web protocols to meet the challenges of establishing trust in our most sensitive digital records.  

Jointly developed by teams at USC and Stanford, the Starling framework leverages multiple decentralized technologies including IPFS, GUN, Hyperledger Fabric, and Hedera Hashgraph throughout its process. For each piece of media captured, the framework is designed to store images on IPFS, using Filecoin, these image’s associated metadata is then stored in a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network, securely protecting any sensitive information. For each media file, a hash of the information stored in Hyperledger Fabric is taken and recorded on the public Hedera network. By doing so, third parties are able to more readily trust the application owner and be assured no bad actor has falsified or modified results after the fact. 

Join the conversation this month about developments and deployments using Hyperledger technologies to drive interoperability with #HyperledgerInterop on social channels. 

Cover image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

May 19
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Poste Italiane Turns to Hyperledger Besu to Streamline Multibrand Loyalty Program

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Member Case Study

Poste Italiane, the Italian postal service, is one of the country’s oldest and biggest organizations with a role that extends well beyond mail and package delivery. Today, Poste Italiane is not just mail delivery but an online marketplace. The Poste Italiane website offers financial products, logistics and insurance services as well as online payments to facilitate integrated communications throughout Italy. With 158 years of history, a network of more than 12,800 post offices, a workforce of 126,000, total financial assets of €536 billion and 35 million customers, Poste Italiane is at the center of Italian commerce.

As the center of commerce and online transactions, Poste Italiane wanted to support the companies within its ecosystem with customer acquisition and retention. Poste Italiane also wanted to encourage customers to engage with its merchant partners and follow their recommendations or accept offers through them.

Poste Italiane began working with the loyalty programs in 2017 when, in partnership with SIA, it created the Extra Sconti App that enables cost savings to debit card holders that also use Postepay cards. Instead of starting with a network of big shops, it created a platform called Sconti BancoPosta that initially served over 30 thousand small merchants and soon grew to other well-known brands. 

What makes Poste Italiane’s platform stand out is the creation of a single point of access to multiple loyalty schemes and formation of a loyalty point exchange. It is common for customers to log into an airline miles/rewards account only to see they’re 100 miles shy of a travel reward. The Poste Italiane solution lets customers combine points from different programs to reach the threshold required to purchase the rewards, making it a truly customer centric approach. When customers only accrue points with one merchant, the value of those points are limited.

To build this solution, Poste Italiane turned to blockchain technology, specifically, Hyperledger Besu. The system uses blockchain for digital wallets, tokens and smart contracts to deliver value for consumers and the retail partners in the system.

Customers can easily access their accounts and rewards, via a mobile app provided either by Poste Italiane or any of the partners and set up their account. After accepting the terms and conditions, a new wallet is generated. Whenever they want to use their rewards, they can create a voucher that combines points from various programs and is redeemable in the system. The collection of points is also digital – the user can generate a QRcode that represents their wallet address where the partner and merchants can transfer the points. While having a single platform makes it convenient for consumers, they can still use the designated apps from various merchants and use the Poste Italiane app to transfer their points and convert them into loyalty tokens on the platform.

Points, vouchers and any other assets that consumers collect through the partner programs in the Poste Italiane app get converted to loyalty tokens. This way, all are equal and can be moved seamlessly between partners. Thanks to smart contracts, it is possible to establish rules that allow the programmability of the tokens for the management of the entire network. Any transaction, be it earning points, exchanging them for tokens or purchasing a reward, happens through a smart contract. Using smart contracts makes the system much more trustworthy and transparent.

Hyperledger worked up with Poste Italians on a case study that details the vital role of loyalty programs in retail and how this solution works to create a differentiated experience for retail partners and consumers. Read the full case study here.

May 10
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Universal DLT interoperability is now a practical reality

By Luke Riley, Head of Innovation at Quant Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric

Anyone who’s involved in the implementation of DLT-based solutions will need no introduction to  the problem of interoperability. It’s an issue that has dogged the technology from the very  beginning and has severely limited its application. Now, though, that era is in the past. Today, DLTs  can interoperate seamlessly and easily, allowing their full potential to be realised across a multitude  of use cases. Here, we’ll take a look at how this breakthrough has been achieved. And we’ll begin  with a review of the problem and the various attempts to solve it.  

Over the years, there have been many attempts to solve the problem of interoperability. Of the  various approaches taken, the World Economic Forum (WEF) identified three main categories: Cross  Authentication (DLT-relayers), Oracles and the API Gateway. Which, of course, begs the obvious  question: which is the best path to follow in the search for true universal interoperability? 

To answer this question we will firstly introduce each approach and follow with a comparison between them.

WEF DLT Interoperability Category 1: Cross Authentication

This interoperability category is the most decentralised of the three categories. It requires separate authorization on each side of the interoperability connection. Examples include:                                       
–  Hash-locking: this is used, for example, to atomically swap assets across distributed ledgers.                                   
–  DLT-Relayers: these are distributed ledger communication protocols that act as orchestration layers between other distributed ledgers. They are designed for the exchange of different types of messages between these networks. Two DLT- relayer examples are Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0.                    

WEF DLT Interoperability Category 2: Oracles

Oracles allow distributed ledgers to connect to external data resources (which may be another distributed ledger). Oracles are therefore orchestration layers, connected to different resources, that perform various actions according to on-chain and off-chain pre-defined bespoke rules. Some oracles not only pass information from an external data resource to smart contracts but also send data from the distributed ledger back to the external resources. There is usually a single oracle to perform each task, but occasionally there can be a collection of oracles performing the same task (in a permissioned or permissionless manner). Smart contract logic then states how consensus of data is achieved between multiple inputs recorded by different oracles. An example of an oracle system is Chainlink.                   

WEF DLT Interoperability Category 3: API Gateway

An API provides access to a server and the resources it is connected to. An API gateway provides organised access to many underlying API resources, simplifying requests to the underlying resources to improve the user experience. A DLT API gateway can have shared end points across distributed ledger networks, standardise DLT data objects and can compress many DLT actions into one endpoint. This is the approach we take with Quant’s Overledger API.

One way to determine the best interoperability path to follow in the search for true universal interoperability is to look at how each approach “scores” in terms of the key functional criteria that defines a robust, flexible and scalable solution. These criteria are:  

Proven Technology 

While it’s true that DLT-relayers have been in development for many years, they are not yet  proven technology – there is, as yet, no stable implementation running in a high-load  environment. A similar story is true of oracles – although data feed technology is  established, data feeds from one distributed ledger network (DLN) to another and back again has yet to be proven in practice. API gateways, on the other hand, have a long-proven record with many thousands  of implementations around the world. 

Decentralisation method: As pointed out by the WEF, the three different models have  different decentralisation properties. DLT-relayers, for example, can be fully decentralised if a permissionless DLN is used. Oracles, however, have two different levels of permissions. One depends on the network permissions, the other depends on the smart contract permissions. With API gateways, on the other hand, the amount of decentralisation is provided by the ecosystem of separate API gateways run by different stakeholders. 

How users interact: For DLT-relayers, users either need to be provided with direct access to relayer nodes, or they must be given access to DLT-relayer nodes through an API gateway  model. Non-oracle users can interact with the on-chain oracle smart contracts, or they can  interact with an off-chain oracle instance. For the API gateway itself, users interact through the API using standard elements like REST. 

Resilience: The resilience of DLT-relayers depends on the consensus protocols it runs, particularly that of the connecting chain. As each consensus protocol has limits on the  percentage of malicious nodes that it can handle, the resilience of the entire network is  dependent on the number of nodes in the network. With oracles, the more oracles that feed  data about the same topic, the more resilient the system – generally speaking – will be. An  API gateway’s resilience is determined by the number of instances running and its load  balancing capabilities and can be tuned for each type of use case.

Combining permissionless and permissioned DLNs: As yet there is no technical, or convincing theoretical demonstration, of how this can be completed using DLT-relayers without compromising security. 

The brief analysis above points to a clear conclusion: API gateways have significant advantages over  the other approaches. And it was for this reason that Quant chose the API gateway model for  Overledger, our own solution to the challenge of interoperability. Developed by a team highly  experienced in enterprise security and nation-level critical systems, Overledger is built on research  that began as a collaboration with UCL, and now provides a secure, simple, and cost-effective API connection to all major DLTs. A robust, enterprise-grade solution, Overledger is easily integrated  with multiple DLTs, including Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Besu, and Quant is constantly expanding the list of supported DLTs. 

Today, Overledger is helping to unlock the potential of DLTs in many major projects across the world. One of the most ambitious of these projects is LACChain, an alliance led by the Inter-American  Development Bank. Operating across the Latin American and Caribbean region, LACChain is already  having demonstrable positive social impact, and the consortium has developed a roadmap that will ultimately lead to the interconnection of regional DLT ecosystems. 

Achieving success will require the integration of LACChain (which provides both Hyperledger Besu and EOS technologies) and Quant’s unique Overledger technology. This will facilitate the creation of a new, fast cross-border payments system for the region, using tokenised currency. By flexibly tokenising money, using Quant’s (patent-pending) multi-DLT token technology (MLTS), the LACChain DLN will power a variety of new solutions, ranging from money transfers between private individuals to government and corporate payments, as well as many other future LACChain  use cases.  

One immediate benefit of this breakthrough will be a revolution in remittances and financial  inclusion. For example, where, currently, cross-border banking services for people such as migrant  workers or farmers are hard to access and unreliable, the LACChain solution, supported by Overledger, will allow foreign and/or local currency to be transferred in a simple but secure manner,  with affordable transaction costs. The system has the potential to be expanded to the large-volume  market of the unbanked or others currently excluded from the financial system. In short, the LACChain/Quant partnership will open the door to a host of faster, more efficient and  more inclusive financial processes and applications in the LAC region, ranging from cross-border and  interbank settlement, to the deployment of digital wallets and smart contracts. The pilot phase of the LACChain project is already well advanced, and full commercial development over the coming twelve months will be a landmark year for DLTs and DLNs.

Nov 04
Love0

Announcing Hyperledger Besu 20.10.0

By Hyperledger Besu Team Blog, Hyperledger Besu

This release includes new versioning and mainnet-focused advancements

The Hyperledger Besu team is excited to announce today’s Hyperledger Besu 20.10.0 release. 

You might have noticed that the versioning for this quarterly release is a little different than prior Hyperledger Besu releases. The Hyperledger Besu community recently decided to switch its versioning to calendar versioning, known as CalVer. Instead of the historic semantic versioning used by Besu and other Hyperledger projects, the Besu team decided to use CalVer moving forward. In all future releases, you will notice the project versions will start with the year and month (YY.M) of the last major release candidate, followed by a patch number for incremental releases, which results in a YY.M.patch, or 20.10.0 for this release. The Besu team believes this will better track the project’s changes and it follows many other successful open source projects that use Calver, including Splunk and Ubuntu.

Check out the old vs. new versioning in the table below.

ProjectReleaseOld Release VersioningNew Calver Release Versioning
Hyperledger Besu Hyperledger Besu Q4 Release Candidate 11.6.0-RC120.10.0-RC1
Hyperledger Besu Hyperledger Besu Q4 Release Candidate 21.6.0-RC220.10.0-RC2
Hyperledger Besu Hyperledger Besu Q4 2020 Quarterly Release1.6.020.10.0
Hyperledger Besu Hyperledger Besu subsequent bi-weekly release 1.6.120.10.1


Now to share what is included in the latest release. The Besu community is excited about the continued advancements of the Hyperledger Besu project featured in this release. 

A few highlights for this release include:

  • Flexible Privacy Group Performance tests
  • Mainnet Support Work, including preparing for the Berlin Network Upgrade and EIP-1559 support

Flexible Privacy Group Performance Tests

The ‘add and remove members for privacy groups’ feature was released earlier this year as an early access feature. With privacy groups in Hyperledger Besu, you can add and remove members from a privacy group, creating an improved user experience for private transactions. Privacy groups are built using a private transaction manager, called Orion, to help send private transactions in a permissioned network.

In the 20.10.0 version, privacy groups have been further improved to ensure robust performance. The team performed various tests to ensure the flexible privacy group feature is not a performance bottleneck. 

Flexible privacy groups are now supported when using multi-tenancy. In addition, the team created more library examples and documentation of use cases. 

Mainnet Support Work

Since Hyperledger Besu runs on the public Ethereum mainnet, the Besu community also sought to improve its public chain settings. As a reminder, Hyperledger Besu is the only Hyperledger project that runs on a public chain and in permissioned network settings. This optionality makes it unique and a popular project for trying out both public chain or permissioned network options for a use case.

Berlin Network Upgrade

In this release, the community prioritized work ensuring Hyperledger Besu is ready for the next Ethereum hard fork, Berlin, scheduled to happen in the next few months. You can learn more about Ethereum’s hard forks here. For the Berlin hard fork, the Besu and Ethereum communities are broadly focused on implementing EIPs, or Ethereum Improvement Proposals, that will help with the UX of the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract, add new functionality to the EVM and change gas costs to reflect their execution time more accurately. 

EIP-1559

In addition to its work on the Berlin network upgrade, the Besu team has also been leading efforts to implement EIP-1559. EIP-1559 is a highly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum’s transaction fee market. This EIP’s goal is to make the Ethereum fee market more efficient. You can read more about the current status of EIP-1559 here in a post written by Tim Beiko, one of our Besu team members.

What’s Next?

The Hyperledger Besu community remains committed to improving its project and making it fit for production blockchain use cases. Watch for new features addressing node hibernation and Bonsai Tries database improvements in our next quarterly release.

Get Involved

Download the latest version of Hyperledger Besu here.

Interested in learning more or curious on how to get started with Hyperledger Besu? Check out the Besu docs, view the tutorials, visit the wiki, or take a look at some open issues in GitHub. 

Stay tuned to hear more about our work in Ethereum and Hyperledger and about how Hyperledger Besu is continuing to lead the enterprise blockchain space.

Sep 28
Love1

#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.

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