Hyperledger Global Forum

“Welcome to the new normal!”  When I wrote that sentence as part of the title for my panel discussion at this year’s Hyperledger Global Forum, I reflected on how much had changed since last year’s in-person Global Forum that was held right before the worldwide pandemic shut everything down. In fact, that was the last in-person conference that I have attended in fifteen months, and Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger’s Executive Director, mentioned during his opening keynote presentation that he had a similar experience. This new normal was the driver for my panel discussion at Global Forum with Alfonso Govela, Jyoti Ponnapali, David Boswell, and Jim Mason about the significant transition of Hyperledger Meetups from always being an in-person event to now trying to have the presentations appeal to a much broader virtual audience.

It was readily apparent from attending the three days of Global Forum that the attendees were very engaged in the virtual event and that the overall sense of community had grown stronger during the past year by virtue of having universal virtual collaboration across groups due to the pandemic. Arnaud Le Hors, Hyperledger TSC Chair, did a great job of highlighting all of the significant projects and innovation under the Hyperledger greenhouse during his keynote.  

I enjoyed serving as a moderator for a few of the sessions, but I really want to congratulate the entire Hyperledger events team, especially Daniela Barbosa, Karen Ottoni, Emily Ruf, Celia Stamps and Helen Garneau, on their hard work and  the monumental effort that went into creating a very successful, inclusive and diverse two track event that highlighted all of the contributors from around the world within one seamless event. 

I attended a variety of technical, business and impact track events, and the Hopin virtual event platform worked well and allowed for good audience interaction with the breakout sessions. The virtual networking sessions in Gather.Town were also fun, as networking, whether virtual or in person, is a critical component of any successful conference. One of the other great fun networking events was the trivia session run by Alissa Worley, Global Marketing Director – Blockchain, as part of Accenture’s diversity and inclusion sponsorship, and the music provided by DJ JRIP.  Who knew that Brian Behlendorf was also once a D.J.?!

One thing that really highlighted the commitment of Hyperledger Members like IBM to the open source community for me was the keynote announcement by Kareem Yusuf, General Manager AI Applications and Blockchain, that they were contributing source code for a number of new Hyperledger Labs, including Fabric Operations Console and  one that supports token exchanges on Hyperledger Fabric.

The dynamic keynotes by David Treat of Accenture about his work with multi-party systems and FDA Deputy Commissioner Frank Yiannas around the use of blockchain to ensure food safety highlighted the thriving Hyperledger projects that are achieving real world success.

The rich content covered in the breakout sessions was phenomenal! I enjoyed many of the sessions that covered verifiable SSI credentials (Michelle Ghazal & Nate Sulat and Stephen Curran & John Jordan), industry blockchain consortia (Si Chen), blockchain interoperability (Peter Somogyvari), Central Bank Digital Currencies (David Treat, Jennifer Peve and John Velissarios), Hyperledger Ursa (Mike Lodder), supply chain security (Vipin Bharanthan), trade finance (Mark Cudden), and thriving ecosystems (Melanie Cutlan).  (You can dive into the video stream of these sessions and more here.)

Some of the other keynote presentations that stood out to me included those on topics highly relevant to today such as the use of blockchain to fight climate change and to provide health credentials for international travel as well as the overview of the Hyperledger Governing Board by Robert Palantick of DTCC. It was also nice to hear about some of the new hot items such as NFTs with Imogen Heap, Daniel Heyman, Brendan Cooper, and Daniel Heyman, as well as how blockchain can take on misinformation in general as outlined in the keynote presentation by Jonathan Dotan. 

Other highlights from Global Forum were some solid collaborations with the Ethereum and ConsenSys communities through Brian Behlendorf’s fireside chat with Vitalik Bueterin and the breakout sessions by Danno Ferrin, Grace Hartley and Adam Clark around Hyperledger Besu.

I’m proud to be a part of such a welcoming, purpose-driven, and inclusive community and looking forward to the next Hyperledger Global Forum when we can get back to having the “new normal” look much more like the “old normal.” It will be all the more welcoming when the diverse Hyperledger community can once again come together in person.

I remember the first week of March 2020 well. It was a week filled with awkward elbow bump greetings followed by inspiring conversations and good times with some of my favorite people at the aptly named Corona Ranch. It was Hyperledger Global Forum. 

In the hallway chats that ensued after my keynote, Blockchain – What’s next?, there was a common sentiment that the technology was rapidly accelerating, and sense of confidence that we could apply these technologies to prepare the world for potential disruption.  

Those conversations were prescient, but who would have ever predicted just how long, broad and deep this global disruption would be? 

We didn’t fully imagine what was about to transpire, and yet, with the help of collaboration and technology, we continued moving forward.  

In the year since we last saw each other, we’ve made immense progress in inventing new forms of money, re-platforming financial services infrastructure, rearchitecting supply chains into resilient and secure supply networks, and pursuing self-managed digital identity.  

This confirms what I know to be true: Hyperledger is at the center of the blockchain ecosystem and you all are leading the way in building real technologies and production systems the world can use to rapidly transform how business is done for massive positive impact.  

The Hyperledger community has a long-standing vision for sharing infrastructure to solve real problems. If only they had already been deployed at scale when the pandemic hit. Now, the tech acceleration of the past year proves the world is ready to embrace the possibilities of the technologies we’ve been evangelizing to position most effectively for what comes next.  

Hyperledger Global Forum 2021 may look a little different than years past, but the immersive virtual experience will give us the chance to engage with even more people from our global community. We’ve all weathered this massive disruption together – never have I felt more excited to reconnect with you all, build on our existing momentum to solve global problems and roadmap the technical milestones we’ll collectively sprint towards in the year ahead.  

Pouring over this year’s lineup of sessions, I’m seeing the following themes come to the fore:  

• collaborative approaches to coinnovation and interoperability  
• blockchain endeavors to preserve our privacy and our planet; and,  
• the future of finance, supply chains and healthcare. 

Here is a preview of some of the talks related to the above themes that I am particularly looking forward to attending:  

(Coinnovation) How to Create Thriving Ecosystems on Thursday, June 10, at 20:20-20:50 CEST, Accenture’s Melanie Cutlan will discuss different consortium methodologies and how to forge multiparty systems so your ecosystem can thrive long term. 

(Interoperability) Hyperledger Cactus Project Updates on Thursday, June 10, at 19:10-19:40 CEST, Accenture’s Peter Somogyvari and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.’s Shingo Fujimoto will introduce the Hyperledger project that is solving for interoperability by bridging blockchain infrastructures and constructing distributed management services. 

(Privacy) Digital ID: Understanding Perceptions and Expectations on Wednesday, June 9, at 20:20-20:50 CEST, Accenture’s Christine Leong and Alissa Worley will showcase insights from new research on what it will take to drive acceptance and demand for digital identity capabilities. 

(Planet) Oceans Plastics Recycling Solution using Hybrid Blockchain on Wednesday, June 9, at 09:40-10:10 CEST, Wipro Technologies’ Hitarshi Buch will demonstrate a blockchain sustainability initiative to incentivize plastic recycling ratings and change the trajectory of the estimated 86 million metric tons of plastic in our oceans. 

(Finance) Digital Currency Interoperability with Messages on Thursday, June 10, at 09:40-10:10 CEST, dlt.nyc’s Vipin Bharathan will discuss digital currencies, including central bank digital currency (CBDC) and challenges with interoperability between these systems. 

(Supply Chain) Rebuilding Supply Chains into Responsible Supply Networks on Thursday, June 10, at 18:40-19:10 CEST, Accenture’s Tom Fahey & Tal Viskin will explore how sustainability and conscientious consumption have become even more ingrained as top initiatives during the COVID-19 lockdown, and the blockchain-enabled supply network initiatives underway that are meeting those new demands. 

(Healthcare) Trading Partner Authentication and Drug Verification in the US Pharmaceutical Supply Chain on Tuesday, June 8, at 20:50-21:20 CEST, LedgerDomain’s Ben Taylor will share the results of a peer-reviewed study that tested ATP authentication and enhanced verification using Hyperledger Fabric to ensure non-counterfeit, safe and effective pharmaceutical drugs. 

I hope to see you at these sessions and networking events at Hyperledger Global Forum (June 8-10). With so much great content to choose from, you can use the search function to browse scheduled sessions by the topics that most interest you. If you haven’t registered yet, you can do so here. 

As I said after last year’s Hyperledger Global Forum, for me, Hyperledger is a family. It’s a place where I can access friends, experts and colleagues. It’s a place where I can have in-depth conversations, access incredible content, platforms, and share and hear new ideas. If you’re in the blockchain space, attending Hyperledger Global Forum is absolutely essential. 

You can visit with me and others from my talented team in the virtual Accenture booth, located in the Expo area. Bring your questions and we can connect live during the event. You can also learn more about Accenture’s work in this important space at Accenture.com/blockchain. 

The third Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF) is coming up quickly (June 8-10). While this year HGF will be virtual, we’ve gathered in the past in Basel, Switzerland, and Phoenix, Arizona, and are looking forward to meeting in person again in 2022. 

One of the big goals for this year is to make Hyperledger Global Forum as successful and welcoming as past events, even in its virtual format. To help keep us our eyes on that prize, we asked speakers from past events about their involvement and experience at previous HGFs. (We’ve heard from so many HGF speaking alums that we’ve created a three part “Road the Hyperledger Global Forum” series. See Part I and Part II of this series.)

The great thing about our community is that it’s home to a mix of technologists, developers, business users and innovators from starts-ups, enterprises, solution providers, research labs and universities from around the world. And they all have a voice at Hyperledger Global Forum. 

Read on to learn what brought this group of past speakers from our extensive community to HGF and what made the event stand out to them. They also share updates on their projects and use cases and on the trends and technologies on their radars now. 

Tell us a little bit about why you chose to speak at HGF and what your goal was.

Gigo Joseph, Chainyard: “Chainyard is a general member of Hyperledger, and we are honored to share our experiences at HGF with other members in the past few years. A good number of blockchain solutions that are developed by Chainyard are using Hyperledger, specifically Fabric. Hyperledger Global Forum is not just about enterprise blockchain protocol discussions. It is an event to learn about new ways of doing business with blockchain, its challenges, opportunity to meet potential partners and build relationships in highly interactive meetings and workshops. We find that sharing our experiences help us to stay motivated, get recognized, increase our chances to attract top talents and most importantly help us grow.”

Peter Somogyvari, Accenture: “HGF seemed like a great opportunity to meet like-minded people interested in enterprise DLTs. It also seemed like a great venue to gather feedback from the industry regarding the Cactus project (which was a lab called Blockchain Integration Framework at the time).” 

Sean O’Kelly, MEI: “Collaboration, sharing, and community.”

Stephen Curran, Cloud Compass Computing Inc.: “We’re building communities around Indy and Aries and their application for verifiable credentials, and HGF is a great place to get motivated people the information they need.”

Toshiya Cho, Hitachi, Ltd.: “To dispatch information as a governing board member to increase the recognition of Hyperledger as well as promises and challenges for enterprise blockchain.”

Tell us a little about your experience speaking and attending HGF.

Carlos Alberto Castro Iragorri, Universidad del Rosario: “We were able to get interesting feedback and attention to the project. After our participation, we received a lot of emails and contacted a lot of groups with similar interest.”

Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, Circulor: “Very good – engaged audience and good Q&A afterwards. Significant follow up including new customers who were in the audience.”

Gero Dittmann, IBM: “HGF provided valuable insights into the trends in blockchains for business. Our own presentation on a lightweight IoT client for Fabric was very well attended and we received great feedback.”

Waqas Mirza, Avanza Innovation: “It was a truly remarkable experience – learning about innovations taking place in different parts of the world and meeting some very smart people in the community.”

What is the most memorable part of attending and speaking at HGF?

Alejandro Vicente Grabovetsky, AID:Tech: “Presenting and being featured for a workshop was definitely an honour and highlight.”

Bharat Gupta, Infosys Consulting: “The closing session where you get a summary view of all the sessions as well as meeting with colleagues and your clients.” 

Carlos: “The opportunity to participate with projects at different stages. We were at a very early stage but managed to get feedback and learn from the experience of others.”

Gero: “I was introduced to self-sovereign identity (SSI) and Hyperledger Indy, which motivated me to study the technology more deeply and I became an advocate for decentralized identity.”

Gigo: “HGF was a different experience for me, indeed. The entire crowd with a single focus of refining the enterprise blockchain ecosystem was a memorable experience. But the memories of HGF did not stop at the end of the event; it started from there. We recently won a new client who attended our 2018 HGF talk in Switzerland. When asked how they found out, the client was able to recollect our presentation two years back and was able to map his current problem to the solutions we presented. The most memorable feeling is that people remember us even after two years!”

Venkata Siva Vijayendra Bhamidipati: “Speaking with people regarding their use cases for blockchain tech. Whether it was an aid disbursing team in the UN, an airline company in Russia, a small municipality in Canada that used Hyperledger Indy for SSI, it was really memorable and exciting to see blockchain technology being used so widely and with such focus and precision.”

How has your project/use case with Hyperledger tech progressed since you spoke at HGF? 

Alejandro: “Nephos, my python library for deploying Fabric to Kubernetes, got into Hyperledger Labs, but was then archived for lack of maintainers (as I had to resign as a maintainer).”

Bharat: “We are seeing uptick in demand in 2021 after the pandemic year of 2020.”

Douglas: “Volvo project evolved into a full battery passport with CO2 tracking now involving two other car manufacturers. Also a new project with a different customer as a direct result of the talk. Our collaboration with Oracle continues.”

Venkata: “After the talk I gave at HGF 2018, my team and I built upon those constructs and invented a new Blockchain Consensus Protocol called “PPoM” – Predictive Proof of Metrics and published it as an IEEE paper in BCCA 2019 . We also had a slew of patent filings, many based on the work presented in this talk.”

Waqas: “We presented a project that was already delivered to the City of Dubai. Since HGF, Avanza has implemented and delivered more than a dozen blockchain solutions for tier 1 government entities and regulators in the GCC region.”

What new enterprise blockchain topics, technologies or trends are on your radar?

Peter: “CBDCs! And of course (as a maintainer of Cactus) I’m most interested in interoperability topics.”

Sean: “Identity on the blockchain”

Stephen: “The big focus we have is mainstreaming the use of verifiable credentials — issuers, verifiers, wallets and registries of issuers.”

Toshiya: “Information sharing among multiple industries (even with competitors) is raising interests in Japanese market and a consortium called NEXCHAIN has been founded and currently 33 companies (most of them are major) joining. The more participants and stakeholders, consensus building would be tougher to expand and quickly deliver services. And interoperability would be a key issue for the environment with multiple frameworks.”

Hyperledger Global Forum, taking place June 8-10, will provide an opportunity to learn and understand various aspects of the ecosystem, including technical roadmaps, milestones and the latest uses and applications across industries and markets for Hyperledger projects and other related technologies. 

To register for the virtual event, go here.

The third Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF) is coming up quickly (June 8-10). While this year HGF will be virtual, we’ve gathered in the past in Basel, Switzerland, and Phoenix, Arizona, and are looking forward to meeting in person again in 2022. 

One of the big goals for this year is to make Hyperledger Global Forum as successful and welcoming as past events, even in its virtual format. To help keep us our eyes on that prize, we asked speakers from past events about their involvement and experience at previous HGFs. (We’ve heard from so many HGF speaking alums that we’ve created a three-part “Road the Hyperledger Global Forum” series. See Part I here and stay tuned for Part III.)

The great thing about our community is that it’s home to a mix of technologists, developers, business users and innovators from starts-ups, enterprises, solution providers, research labs and universities from around the world. And they all have a voice at Hyperledger Global Forum. 

Read on to learn what brought this group of past speakers from our extensive community to HGF and what made the event stand out to them. They also share updates on their projects and use cases and on the trends and technologies on their radars now. 

Tell us a little bit about why you chose to speak at HGF and what your goal was.

Anthony Lusardi, Digital Asset/Daml: “I was demonstrating some technology we’re developing at DA that allows for seamless interoperation of applications across different distributed ledgers. The goal was to expose the audience to this new possibility.”

Michal Piechocki, BR-AG (Business Reporting – Advisory Group): “We believed from the beginning that our participation will be a bi-directional exchange. The opportunity to bounce our ideas with such a group of experts were coupled with our belief that blockchain should solve real economy problems. And we brought a major one to the table: how do you identify that an individual claiming credentials related to a business is officially entitled to act on its behalf? This issue extends into a broad regulatory set of use cases. We were thrilled to witness an audience eagerly debating pros and cons of the presented solution. Further discussions on all relevant topics including privacy only enriched our takeaways.” 

Rajesh Dhuddu, Tech Mahindra: “My goal was to tell attendees and others about blockchain chain use cases that have not only attained scale but also delivered good impact for the common man on the street.”

Fernando Martin Garcia Del Angel, Aabo Tech: “I was interested in sharing my experience, success stories, and pitfalls of implementing blockchain technologies on government applications in Mexico. I also wanted to give a third-country perspective on the challenges of implementing bleeding-edge technologies and the ways the open-source community could make accessing documentation easier for these communities.”

Tell us a little about your experience speaking and attending HGF.

Hart Montgomery, Fujitsu Laboratories of America: “The best part of HGF–both speaking and attending–is getting feedback from the community. Are we building the proper tools that solve the problems people want to solve? Are there bottlenecks stopping development or adoption? These are some of the important questions we can find the answers to in the community.”

Isaac Kunkel, Chainyard: “The speaking engagement was good from all aspects. The facility and logistics were good. Audience (more than 125) was good. We had more than one dozen people stick around for questions and post-event engagement. Happy to say we can trace a direct thread back from a large project directly to HL Global Forum speaking opportunity.”

Manjunath A C, Intel Technology: “It was really a proud moment for me to be delivering the talk at such a huge event that is a gathering for attendees from across geographies. I learned about various Hyperledger projects and business use cases built upon them that would be difficult for me to explore all by myself. It was also a platform to exchange our thoughts or views on technologies.”

Phil Windley, Brigham Young University: “I enjoy that while everyone is interested in using ledger technology, there are lots of different use cases and I can broaden my knowledge about how people are using them.” 

What is the most memorable part of attending and speaking at HGF?

Anthony: “Talking with attendees. I got to learn a lot from them and I even met someone who we took on as an intern at DA and they’re now working for us full time!”

Fernando: “Getting to know so many wonderful people inside and outside of the community and being able to learn from their experience.”

Michal: “Meeting the experts at tables in breakout/lunch/vendors area. Open-minded conversations providing motivation, context, discussing difficulties and exploring possible solutions felt invigorating proving that HGF is a true open source community.” 

Waaleed El Sayed, sonono: “The huge public that attended my talk!”

How has your project/use case with Hyperledger tech progressed since you spoke at HGF? 

Kari Korpela, DBE Core Ltd: “Just recently we have launched our solution DBE Core Platform (Hyperledger combined with Open Peppol UBL standard) and a user interface DBE Core Portal. Additionally, we established DBE Lab as a testbed for integration (Linux Foundation member). We were here chosen as one of the most promising blockchain companies in Europe by Blockpool 2020-2021.”

Manjunath: “Since the HGF participation, Avalon has made significant progress with respect to scalability by segregating the key generation mechanism from workload execution. Wipro demonstrated a POC for cold chain for pharma use case in association with quorum blockchain. Other POCs with reputed organizations are still undergoing.”

Rajesh: “Progressed very well. Forbes recognized Tech Mahindra for its implementation and impact in 2021 Forbes Blockchain 50 companies.”

Waaleed: “I won the implementation for new projects: one for the government of Basel in Switzerland and another one from Siemens Switzerland. I also give training to prepare developers for CHFA & CHFD certifications.”

What new enterprise blockchain topics, technologies or trends are on your radar?

Hart: “More efficient zero knowledge proof systems, faster consensus algorithms, and post-quantum cryptography are some things that interest me.”

Isaac: “IOT/AI/ML/Blockchain intersection, healthcare industry applications, supply chain transparency/security are getting more attention.”

Kari: “Hyperledger for supply chain data exchange”

Phil: “New SSI technologies for creating faster, decentralized solutions to the problems of internet identity”

Hyperledger Global Forum, taking place June 8-10, will provide an opportunity to learn and understand various aspects of the ecosystem, including technical roadmaps, milestones and the latest uses and applications across industries and markets for Hyperledger projects and other related technologies. 

To register for the virtual event, go here.

The third Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF) is coming up quickly (June 8-10). While this year HGF will be virtual, we’ve gathered in the past in Basel, Switzerland, and Phoenix, Arizona, and are looking forward to meeting in person again in 2022. 

One of the big goals for this year is to make Hyperledger Global Forum as successful and welcoming as past events, even in its virtual format. To help keep us our eyes on that prize, we asked speakers from past events about their involvement and experience at previous HGFs. 

The great thing about our community is that it’s home to a mix of technologists, developers, business users and innovators from starts-ups, enterprises, solution providers, research labs and universities from around the world. And they all have a voice at Hyperledger Global Forum. 

Read on for more about what brought 10 past speakers from across our extensive community to HGF and what made the event stand out to them. They also share updates on their projects and use cases and on the trends and technologies on their radars now. 

Tell us a little bit about why you chose to speak at HGF and what your goal was

Baohua Yang, Oracle America, Inc.: “Share the experience of using Hyperledger technologies and also raise existing problems from real user cases. Also trigger thoughts for the Hyperledger roadmap.”

Ben Taylor, LedgerDomain / Clinical Supply Blockchain Working Group: “Hyperledger Fabric is an exciting project with flexible modular design, the backing of major industry players, a healthy developer community, great documentation, and a plethora of tutorials and ‘hello world’ code samples. At the same time, it’s maddeningly difficult to develop an end-to-end understanding of Fabric as a platform, create custom deployments, and develop real-world user-facing applications backed by smart contracts. 

This is as much a social and political challenge as it is a technological challenge, and requires the ability to work with various stakeholders to demonstrate value as well as set a clear direction. Along with showcasing results from a real-world use case of Hyperledger Fabric, we wanted to share our insights and strategies related to the key questions of governance and orchestration.”

Markus Stauffiger, 4eyes GmbH: “I often profit from other people’s efforts and know-how and hoped to give something back by sharing our experience to those starting with Hyperledger.” 

Mohan Venkataraman, Chainyard: “As a blockchain practitioner and technology evangelist, I was quite motivated to share my experiences, thought leadership and make connections. I have worked on over 30 projects, some in Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum and a bit on Aris and BigChainDb. The learnings have been tremendous and sharing that with fellow practitioners and learning from their success and failures was part of it.”

Tell us a little about your experience speaking and attending HGF

Thomas Goetz, PostFinance AG: “It was striking to see the worldwide interest in the Hyperledger project. We had a number of interesting conversations and contacts before and after our presentation.”

Mohan: “It was amazing as we have an over full room of over 150 attendees, despite of being the last presentation of the day. The questions were pouring and people were curious about our experience in building highly performant Fabric solutions. Our methodology, accelerators and reference architectures were well appreciated.”

Saptarshi Choudhury, Paramount Software Solutions: “I loved the live interaction with the audience from different parts of the world who helped co-create values while speaking as a panelist, and I truly enjoyed all the sessions of the Hyperledger Global Forum.”

Shengwei You, University of Notre Dame: “It’s a very informative and awesome experience, and I feel everything was arranged well.”

What is the most memorable part of attending and speaking at HGF?

Benjamin Djidi: “The people. I was really impressed by the different project bearers and contributors.”

Markus Stauffiger: “The openness, sharing of ideas, experiences and know-how. The no-bullshit attitude, where critical thinking is welcome. Also the inclusiveness, which is very obvious with the people, but it extends to all aspects, such as technology & philosophy.”

Thomas Bohner, IntellectEU: “Meeting new people and building long-term partnerships and client relationships.”

Thomas Goetz: “The keynotes gave a very good overview of the ecosystem and emerging trends. It was very motivating to be part of the community.”

How has your project/use case with Hyperledger tech progressed since you spoke at HGF? 

Ben Taylor: “Since we shared our results from the BRUINchain study, we have extended the framework to encompass all prescription drugs in the United States, an*d have tested it at scale and with production data. The framework is currently in the process of being rolled out with participating health centers and drug manufacturers. We published the results of our pilot with UCLA Health, Genentech, Amgen, Sanofi and others in December 2020, and at time of writing our peer-review study with real-world enhanced drug verification is set to be published in the next several days.”

Mathews Thomas, IBM: “Multiple use cases were covered and several have gone into production with various clients. Also kept in touch with some folks I met and continue exchanging ideas.”

Saptarshi Choudhury: “We are now in a pilot stage with our Farm2Plate solution and also developing another product catering democratization of energy by P2P energy trade.We are also working on a Social impact project with BlueNumber on ID for farmers.”

Shengwei You: “I was a summer intern for the Hyperledger Caliper project. More users are paying attention to this project, and I feel there are more improvements we can do to make things better and more user friendly.”

What new enterprise blockchain topics, technologies or trends are on your radar?

Baohua: “Zero knowledge, China standard of crypto, PBFT implementation”

Benjamin Djidi: “Aries is very interesting. I’m generally fond of ZKP topics and followings updates to the existing frameworks (especially Fabric, Indy, Ursa).”

Mathews: “Application of blockchain in emerging areas for different industries (e.g ,Telecom – 5G, Media – Decentralized media network)”

Thomas Bohner: “CBDC, Digital Cash, Quantum Technology”

Hyperledger Global Forum, taking place June 8-10, will provide an opportunity to learn and understand various aspects of the ecosystem, including technical roadmaps, milestones and the latest uses and applications across industries and markets for Hyperledger projects and other related technologies. 

To register for the virtual event, go here.

Hyperledger Global Forum is the most important annual event for enterprises that adopt consortium blockchain technologies. Hundreds of blockchain enthusiasts come together at the annual Hyperledger Forum to share their user cases and the latest progress on enterprise blockchain technologies. During the conference, I presented on the 10 critical problems and requirements to consider based on numerous enterprise blockchain implementation projects using Hyperledger Fabric-based Oracle Blockchain Platform (OBP). These projects cover the gamut of industries, including financial services, supply chain, healthcare, and government, and range from custom developments supported by the Oracle solutions team to SI-led projects and ISV solutions. 

These critical issues include: 

1. Using SQL for rich queries in Smart Contracts
2. Data Backup/Recovery
3. Ledger checkpoint and pruning/archiving
4. Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus
5. Governance
6. Performance
7. Privacy & Confidentiality Protection
8. Inter-network Support
9. Pluggable Crypto Implementations
10. Auditing Capability 

Although the original public blockchains rely on a self-sovereign management style with complete decentralization and rules governed by consensus algorithms, permissioned blockchains have a different structure. In the enterprise-permissioned blockchains used in private or consortium deployments, the participating enterprises are often concerned about maintaining their own nodes with efficiency and resiliency while, at the same time, working as part of a cross-company blockchain network. This requires a secure and flexible governance model and on-chain collaboration mechanisms to address the many operational issues at different layers of the blockchain network – from interoperable connections, to storage management, membership governance, chaincode distribution, etc. As organizations set up their blockchain networks, there are several things they need to pay particular attention to and design their networks with in mind. 

SQL and Smart Contracts

The first issue is about supporting SQL language for rich queries in smart contracts – queries of Key/Value data that apply conditions to the values. While some are neutral on this issue, my team views this as an important option for enterprise users, especially those who want to migrate their existing SQL-based business logic into blockchain smart contracts quickly. Using extensive SQL SELECT capabilities minimizes the code complexity and enables a single query to aggregate results that would otherwise involve multiple queries (necessitating multiple network hops between the chaincode container and peer container where the world state database resides). Based on the open-sourced BerkeleyDB K/V store with SQL-Lite, Oracle Blockchain Platform allows customers to enjoy the power of SQL, while also achieving more than 2000 TPS. For interoperability purposes, CouchDB Query Language is also supported in the chaincodes on top of Berkeley DB world state database.

Blockchain Data Backup & Recovery 

For production customers, questions about how to backup and recover the data for blockchain networks are very critical. Although it’s easy to create a new node in theory, it is not practical to wait hours for a new node to sync up the ledger data from existing blockchain nodes and transfer configuration metadata. And when there’s the requirement to migrate a node across datacenters, this recovery operation becomes critical. Oracle has already resolved this problem by designing specific tools for OBP customers, which avoid service disruptions when migrating or upgrading the blockchain nodes.

Ledger Pruning and Archiving

Some of our customer projects expect to handle very large transaction volumes (e.g., a maritime shipping network tracking 10s of millions of shipments/year, each recording on-chain a large number of documentation and logistics events, could exceed 3B transactions/year). Depending on the payload size and number of digital signatures (endorsers) attached to the transaction, the total storage requirements could grow to the levels that are going to be difficult to manage. There’s a strong interest by some of the leading customers in a solution that can prune the ledger, archive old content, and keep the overall storage requirements manageable. Some work is underway in Fabric (e.g., FAB-106 Jira). We believe a solution to the ledger pruning requirements is mandatory and are exploring different approaches consistent with the overall architecture of Fabric in order to be prepared when customer blockchains grow big enough to need a solution.    

Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is defined as the feature of a distributed network to reach consensus (agreement on the same value) even when some of the nodes in the network fail to respond or respond with incorrect information.

An important consideration to be aware of while setting up a blockchain network is the requirements of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus, compared with the Crash Fault Tolerant (CFT) one. Due to the underlying complexity of BFT consensus algorithms, a best practice is for the community to leverage the latest academically-proven consensus algorithms based on rigorous and peer-reviewed demonstrations of the safety and liveness properties. Such algorithms include the Tendermint, Algorand, Mir-BFT and HotStuff. There is also some on-going work on Golang-based implementation of the BFT-SMART algorithm for Hyperledger Fabric.  These are important reference points for blockchain architects and developers interested in adopting BFT consensus in the future.  At Oracle ,we are actively exploring the available options to ensure they meet the rigorous proof requirements as well as deliver operational characteristics, including performance and resilience required in enterprise applications.

Governance

Governance is another strong requirement, particularly in consortium blockchains, and all audiences believe this is a feature they seriously need. The lack of governance creates challenges in real applications (e.g., how to agree on adding new members, creating new channels and setting their policies, deploying or upgrading smart contracts, etc.). Although users can negotiate these out-of-band using email, conference calls, etc., it is untrustworthy in theory and very inconvenient in practice, especially to achieve agreements across different organizations. And it certainly doesn’t scale for consortiums with more than a dozen members.  

We recommend several practical solutions to address the issue using on-chain mechanisms to provide an audit trail for governance-related agreements and chaincodes to automate the processes for reaching these agreements through voting and other means. This could be supported via a special governance channel for persisting transactions, votes, and policy evaluation results, similar to the system channel that is used to help govern the ordering services; the other part would be a Governance System chaincode (GSCC); and the last piece is to use External distributed governing service provided by vendors. 

The GSCC option is very promising because in the Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 release organizations can vote for chaincode lifecycle with the help of the implicit collection. Thus, it is feasible to extend the functionality to allow users to vote for other operations, such as adding new members or creating channels. It could also track proposals, manage vote tabulations, and evaluate them against policy requirements. Part of the GSCC implementation has been verified by the Fabric interop team.

Performance of a Blockchain Network

Although customers often ask for performance numbers, sometimes there is a misunderstanding of the performance metrics. For example, in blockchain, the performance metrics include throughput and latency, and results will vary under different network size and hardware configurations and the tradeoffs made between higher throughput vs. lower latency. In analyzing typical blockchain scenarios from finance to supply chain and healthcare to IoT, we can see that the performance requirement is not the same for each scenario. A suggested best practice is to optimize the performance from a systematic view. For example, the chaincode often does lots of calculation, while the ledger will require storage, and the consensus is sensitive to network latency. Hence, a reasonable performance optimization solution will be based on the thoughtful understanding of the business demands and the platform architecture. In customer benchmarks we have observed significant impact of the payload size as transactions move between clients, peers, and orderers; number of peer nodes and their CPU capacity in an instance; ordering block size (more transactions/block can significantly improve throughput but at some cost to latency); network capacity between ordering service and the peers, and other factors. Properly tracking all of these factors and optimizing for those that are most important in the context of a specific application enabled us to meet the highest levels of customer requirements, including exceeding 2000 TPS in a maritime logistics blockchain network.

Data Privacy and Business Confidentiality

Data privacy, which is becoming an important bottleneck in blockchain, has been discussed for quite a while. Enterprise blockchains that plan to share confidential business data are particularly concerned about confidentiality between certain participants and shielding this data from access by other participants. There are a number of approaches, but no perfect solution. Even with the private data collections (PDCs) in Fabric, there’s complexity of configuring PDCs when transactions span different members and when new members join the network. Implicit PDCs in Fabric 2.0 help to some extent. But even with PDCs,  the hashed results are still recorded in the ledger, enabling those with access to detect the relationships and frequency of transactions, if not their content. 

When blockchain nodes run as a managed cloud service with users only able to access them through the APIs and event subscriptions (and not by accessing the underlying files systems where the ledgers are stored), data privacy can be managed easier.  The channel access policies can be set to prevent unauthorized members from seeing detailed block content through event subscriptions and to enable only authorized members to deploy or upgrade chaincode. When coupled with a unique feature of Oracle Blockchain Platform that enables the use of on-chain fine-grained Access Control Lists (ACLs) in smart contracts, the chaincode can control the access based on the user’s identity. And we suggest customers encrypt important data before putting them on the private database (shared by PDC members.) Ultimately, if you care about data privacy, a good rule to follow is to encrypt all your data before putting it on the blockchain.

Inter-Network Operations

This topic spurs a number of active conversations, but the answers aren’t clear today. Let’s break this down into a few more specific questions about what Inter-network operations mean. First, is it about multiple nodes and networks built on the same technology stack (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric)? The Hyperledger Interop Working Group kicked off at the past Hyperledger forum in Basel has been working on testing and documenting how multiple members’ implementations can interoperate. The testing done as part of this working group by Oracle, SAP, and IBM has shown that their nodes can join each other’s network and interop with a common ordering service and channels. The next question is about interop between separate Fabric networks with their own ordering services and channels. This is possible within Fabric architecture, whereby a peer node can be configured to connect with multiple ordering services and see channels supported by each of them. When coupled with inter-chaincode query capability, this enables a chaincode on one network to query a chaincode from another network for data from its ledger.

Moving to heterogeneous technology stacks, what about interop between Fabric and other blockchain technologies, such as Ethereum, Corda, Quorum, etc.? Again, we need to break this down to more specific questions. For example, do we want to:

• Read/query data from multiple ledgers?
• Write data to multiple ledgers with consistent results (i.e., both are committed or none)?
• Involve nodes and members from multiple networks in consensus mechanisms?

The answers vary. Querying the data is possible using “oracles,” gateways that can retrieve data from one trusted source and make it available to another network, while mediating trust relationships (e.g., using Chainlink). Writing data consistently is possible using centralized intermediary gateways, which is not wholly satisfying, but even then the diverse models of finality across these stacks make this challenging as deterministic finality in Fabric is not always possible in other networks. Cross-network consensus remains at the level of academic research and will not be achieved in the near term.

Pluggable Crypto Implementations

The regulatory compliance requirements in some regions (e.g., Asia, Russia and, potentially, the EU) require that blockchains align with regional crypto standards. Today this is handled by scanning Fabric implementation for all uses of specific crypto libraries and the painstaking effort to replace these with regional/country crypto standards. Making the crypto service pluggable will save a huge programming effort, and it can promote the open source technologies into a broader market. Fabric Jira FAB-5496 has been created to track this.

Auditing Capability

Finally, the issues of supporting auditing must be considered. Compared with logging, metrics and tracing, auditing is specific for business and legal regulation and compliance (used by auditors and accountants). In some projects involving Intercompany accounting and billing reconciliation, the information on the ledger related to how invoices are settled and paid feeds into financial systems that are subject to SOX-404 compliance requirements. This means that internal or external audit teams need to be able to verify the source data and the integrity of the systems that maintain it. While we provide tamper-evident block chaining capability in Fabric, we do not currently provide tools to allow a user to re-verify on-demand the cryptographic hashes linking the blocks or the validity of the digital signatures (and the current status of the certificates) attached to past transactions. In discussions with the SIs that are implementing blockchain projects for some of our customers and are also involved in audits, it became clear that having such APIs for auditing purposes would be very useful and could promote the use of blockchain in the financial departments of many enterprises. 

Summary

Enterprise blockchain is rapidly gaining adoption in many industries and for many use cases. In our experience, practical applications of blockchain in production deployments by early adopters raise a number of key considerations and challenges that have to be addressed for greater acceptance of enterprise blockchain in the mainstream. Our blockchain team and partner ecosystem is exploring a number of these topics with customers. As an active Hyperledger member, Oracle is providing recommendations and suggesting approaches to these “bleeding-edge” issues through the various working groups and the TSC. Jointly with the rest of the Hyperledger community, we continue to evolve Fabric and other Hyperledger projects to meet these requirements for the broader set of companies and other organizations who will be adopting these technologies in the coming years.

In case you missed my session at the Hyperledger Forum, or were unable to attend, you can watch the session replay of “Practical Issues in Blockchain Implementation.” 

Developers can learn more helpful tips by downloading the complimentary Oracle Blockchain Developer eBook.

About the Author

Baohua Yang, Oracle, Principal Architect, Oracle Blockchain Platform

Baohua has served the Hyperledger community as a member of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and co-chair of the Technical Working Group in China (TWGC) from 2017-2019. As an open-source developer, he contributes  to numbers of projects (e.g., Hyperledger, OpenStack and OpenDaylight), and is leading several (e.g., Hyperledger Cello, fabric-sdk-py). More about him can be found at yeasy.github.com.