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Hyperledger Labs

Dec 15
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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Documentation and Use Cases for Climate Action

By Hyperledger Blog, Climate, 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

Documentation and Use Cases for Climate Action

Description To improve documentation of the blockchain carbon accounting applications, including tutorials on how to develop and enhance the applications and use cases for the applications.
Status COMPLETED 
Difficulty LOW
Additional Details Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Dounia Marbouh

Khalifa University

“The Hyperledger Mentorship Program was a great opportunity for me to grow and learn from others, especially my mentors. It is a chance to realize that in a world where many pieces of information can be simply “Googled,” there is still some knowledge that can only be gained through experience, and this mentorship program was the best example of that. Also, this experience focused on many competencies and talents, such as research, collaboration and communication, which are immensely invaluable. “

Mentors

Si Chen

Open Source Strategies, Inc.

Sherwood Moore

CA2 SIG Co-chair

Si Chen

“In this project, our different backgrounds came together to take us a lot further. We found out that the carbon credits and offsets market is much more complicated than originally anticipated. While many people want to use blockchains to improve the liquidity of the carbon credits market by making transactions more efficient, what the market really needs is greater trust in the quality of the credits and lower costs to bring them to market. We also learned that a successful mentorship is a partnership, where everyone—mentors and mentees—need to come prepared to both contribute and learn.”

Sherwood Moore

“I really enjoyed this opportunity to mentor, and I found that I learned from the experience as much as I shared my expertise. I really enjoyed being able to share from my experience conducting market research and identifying opportunities by tapping into the knowledge of the stakeholders within it. At the same time, it was really interesting to learn more about the voluntary carbon market, which was the focus of our research, as well as the world of academic publications, which was the end goal and deliverable of our work. All in all, a very successful internship project, and I look forward to participating in more.”

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.

Dec 14
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Hyperledger Mentorship Spotlight: Blockchain Integration for Climate Emissions Data with Fabric and Cactus

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Cactus, Hyperledger Fabric, 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

Blockchain Integration for Climate Emissions Data with Fabric and Cactus

Description To implement an integration from Hyperledger Fabric utility emissions data channel to issue tokens on an Ethereum network using Hyperledger Cactus.
Status COMPLETED 
Difficulty HIGH 
Additional Details Learning Objectives, Expected Outcomes and Project Results available here.

Final Project Video

Mentee

Pritam Singh

Indian Insitute of Technology

“I contributed to making the carbon accounting application (a Hyperledger Lab from the Hyperledger Carbon Action SIG) more secure, stable and maintainable. To improve the security of the application, I designed and implemented offline signing of Hyperledger Fabric’s transactions with private keys stored in HashiCorp’s vault server. In order to make the application production ready, I used the Hyperledger Cactus connectors for integrating multiple blockchain. By employing test-driven development, I made the codebase more maintainable. Thanks to the guidance of all my mentors, I was able to achieve all my goals for the mentorship. 

Through this mentorship, I got the opportunity to see how community driven projects are developed with contributions coming from across the globe.”

Mentors

Si Chen

Open Source Strategies, Inc

Peter Somogyvari

Accenture

Kamlesh Nagware

Snapper Future Tech

Si Chen

“This mentorship addressed the important issue of how to integrate emissions data stored on Hyperledger Fabric with tokens created in Ethereum. Our mentee had strong technical skills and was able to solve many complex technical challenges in making this integration work. Working on open source projects is a great way for mentees to prepare for the real world as it will give them a chance to work with other developers across different areas, figure out existing code and learn the importance of communicating well. For mentors, it’s a great way to introduce new talent into our projects and keep them moving forward.”

Peter Somogyvari

“Being a mentor on this project gave me unique insight into the fight against climate change and put me in touch a lot of great people who are leading the charge on the latter. Pritam, our mentee, demonstrated excellent analytical and technical skills and a true understanding of the open-source software development principles, which puts him on track to do great things in the future both within and outside of the Linux Foundation/Hyperledger.”

Kamlesh Nagware

“Blockchain interoperability is a key topic this year with many enterprises focusing research on it. Hyperledger Cactus provides decentralized, secure and adaptable integration between blockchain networks. In this mentorship project, the main focus was on using Hyperledger Cactus for carbon accounting and carbon credit tokenization to support the blockchain-carbon-accounting project, a Hyperlegder Lab from the Climate Action SIG. Completion of this project shows that interoperability is not just a theory but can be achieved with the right design architecture and approach. Thanks to our mentee, Pritam Singh,  for a wonderful job completing this project. And, in the last, thanks to my co-mentors Peter Somogyvari, Cactus Maintainer, for his support and to Si Chen for the proposing this mentorship project.”

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.

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.

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 Cactus, 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
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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.

 

Jul 07
Love1

The latest on Minifabric: a Hyperledger Lab aimed at accelerating the move to production

By Tong Li, IBM Open Technology Blog, Hyperledger Labs

Minifabric is a Hyperledger Lab that makes setting up a Hyperledger Fabric network easy and fast. It also helps application developers with needed connection profiles and wallets when a Fabric network is up and running. Hyperledger Fabric has powerful capabilities, but there can be challenges with using it to deploy and implement a network, especially for those who are new to distributed ledgers or are used to other blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

With the right tooling though, you can easily deploy Fabric networks, learn how Fabric works, understand the life cycles of Fabric artifacts and become an expert as a Fabric network administrator or chaincode developer. The Minifabric Lab was started with these goals in mind. allows you to easily setup a Fabric network, expand your network, install and upgrade your own chaincode, invoke transactions, inspect your ledger, and change configurations of your channel. 

Minifabric comes as a 10-line bash script (for Linux and OS X) or 30-line batch script (for Windows) and is available on github.com under Apache 2 license. You can get started with Minifabric to start your Hyperledger Fabric journey by simply following this README. 

Recent development work has also added the capability to deploy Hyperledger Fabric onto Kubernetes. In the past, one could use Minifabric to deploy and use Fabric in a Docker environment. Now, with this new added feature, you can deploy Fabric onto Kubernetes clusters such as IKS, GKE and AKS. The commands to accomplish this task are identical with the commands to deploy in a Docker environment, which makes a big difference in terms of using and learning Minifabric. 

Minifabric Resources

On Tuesday, July 27 at 9AM PDT, I will be giving an hour long introduction and demo of Minifabric and will be answering questions. This will be an open call, and everyone is welcome to dial-in and join.

There are also already recorded videos that can help you learn to use Minifabric. Here’s a rundown of video resources and what they cover:

  • Minifabric Introduction and demo
    An overview of Minifabric and demonstration of how to develop go applications using these profiles and monitor the Fabric network using Hyperledger Explorer.
  • Quick Start
    How to use Minifabric to stand up a Fabric network and clean up
  • Channels
    How to create channels, join peers to channels, inspect and change channel configuration
  • Chaincode
    How to work with chaincode including install, approve, commit, upgrade, invoke and query
  • Policy and Organizations
    How to inspect and change endorsement policies, how to bring in new organizations and how to work with private data collections
  • Artifacts and VSCode Fabric Extension
    How to use VSCode Fabric extension to work with a production like Fabric network. Minifabric creates many files that help Fabric SDK users easily connect to a Fabric network. 
  • Inside Minifabric
    How Minifabric executes various commands and how Minifabric is able to always keep up with the latest Fabric. Discusses how Minifabric was designed and implemented, its commands and parameters.

Get Involved

As an open source project, you are welcome to check out the code, submit your own contributions and connect with other people in the community. Check out the Minifabric repo on Github to learn more about how to get involved.

Feb 17
Love1

Full decentralization of Hyperledger Fabric through embedded IoT solutions

By Gary Xu, aitos.io and María Teresa Nieto, Telefónica Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Labs

Almost a year ago, Telefónica brought TrustID to Hyperledger Labs as an open source project.  Telefónica initiated development of TrustID to ease the management of identities across several blockchain networks. The initial idea of TrustID was to decouple the issuance of identities from their consumption and allow users to operate in some networks with credentials issued in others. In this manner, users shouldn’t need to hold a different set of credentials for each network or decentralized application they interact with.

Furthermore, TrustID provides the opportunity to decentralize identity in Hyperledger Fabric. When you deploy a blockchain network using TrustID, identities are organization locking and, therefore, they are centralized on the Certificate Authorities (CAs) that have issued them. Inside the network, several CAs can co-exist, but easy onboarding of new organizations is an unsolved problem that makes it very hard for the network to grow organically as new partners join. Initially, TrustID, as a first approach, solves this restriction of the identity management in Hyperledger Fabric. Furthermore it brings to this technology the chance to really enable a custom decentralized identity management.

As you scale up a deployment, adding many different organizations from different origins, many without trust relationships between them, this identity issue becomes much more serious and limiting between them. However, shifting to decentralized identity management ensures that a network is not dependent on the companies that are part of the solution, making it more resilient in the face of change and growth.

A clear example where we can appreciate these characteristics is the case of the IoT world. Use cases often include companies providing monitoring services with IoT devices, operators offering the communication network, and owners of the devices looking to apply the benefits of this technology to their blockchain-based traceability projects.

The identity management in IoT is a complex scenario that involves the provisioning of certificates in the device and the need to have a public key infrastructure. This process must be accomplished in a secure way, verifying the software in the factory. Once provisioned, the device is able to use its certificate to sign communications with the aim of demonstrating its identity.

However, it’s also known that sometimes the devices are limited in performance or storage. For example, they could be designed to write once in their memory in all their useful life so, if we need to change an identity because the blockchain network has changed, the device could be useless for a blockchain use case.

On the opposite, when the devices can write in their memory many times, the process of updating the firmware or any information stored on it securely is also a hard process. So, at the end, it’s a requirement to have a flexible management of the keys stored at first instance, which, thanks to TrustID, is possible.

Recently, aitos.io and Telefónica have collaborated on a PoC to integrate IoT technology with Telefónica’s TrustOS product. The goal was to use  blockchain technology to perform interactions from the device to the ledger, provisioning the identity and the keys associated directly on the device.

aitos.io developed its blockchain application framework, named BoAT (Blockchain of AI Things), which is an IoT-device-oriented C-language client library for blockchain services, to enable IoT devices to access blockchain. In this PoC, BoAT running in a Fibocom FG150, a 5G blockchain module, helps a FG150-based IoT device access TrustOS services directly. So, as a result, it has been possible to create signed transactions on the device in order to be stored in the TrustOS platform, which is based on Hyperledger Fabric, without any intermediary.

The device manufacturer could register every device onto the TrustID service of TrustOS and write the unique DID allocated by TrustID into the device. When the device is powered on and connected to the network for the first time, BoAT, in the device, imports the device into TrustOS by signing its DID in a JSON Web Signature (JWS) message. In this way, the device, and not the application, is the custodian of the private keys that would be used to sign transactions.

BoAT also provisions the IoT device asset, as a digital twin, on the TrustOS Track service that offers all the traceability functionalities in order to give full transparency of the physical device. Then, the device comprising the BoAT-enabled 5G blockchain module can send periodic updates on its status  (e.g., vehicle speed, heading, etc.) to TrustOS by composing additional JWS messages. All of this generates the possibility of offering, in a transparent way, the traceability of the data generated by the device.

TrustOS and BoAT interaction diagram

In deployments with integrated BoAT technology, all the data the IoT device captures could be directly sent to TrustOS with a cryptographically verifiable DID identifying their origin. That is, not only the data integrity is assured by the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain under TrustOS but also the data provenance can be identified by TrustID. Tampered-resistant IoT data with identifiable origin builds a great value for the industry.

From the point of view of TrustOS, thanks to the implementation of the machine-to-machine interaction and how TrustID manages the authentication and access to the system, it’s possible to avoid unauthorized tampering or unexpected updates. As a result, it adds extra trustworthiness-proof beyond the standard KPI.

Cover image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay.

Dec 15
Love0

Blockchain Automation Framework – the journey

By Michael Klein, Architecture Lead for Accenture Blockchain & Multiparty Systems, with contributions from Priyanka Vats, maintainer and project manager for Blockchain Automation Framework Blog, Hyperledger Bevel, Hyperledger Labs

In the early days and excitement of blockchain, we saw the proverbial ‘hammer looking for nail’ application of the technology across nearly every use case.  With a few years behind us, we now see a maturity in the understanding of the technology and the use cases it can best address. The ecosystem has evolved, and we even see live production implementations with enhanced understanding of where blockchain is the best solution to the problem vs. where it is an overkill.

However, it is not wrong to say that the adoption hasn’t been anywhere near to what was predicted. There are some clear barriers that have hindered the adoption of blockchain. Let’s bring the focus on our own technology journey and barriers in adoption from a technology lens that led us to conceptualize and then bring  Blockchain Automation Framework to Hyperledger Labs as an open source project.

Situation in 2018

In early 2018, we made a conscious decision to steer clear of the blockchain hype that filled news cycles and instead focus on development and architecture work. By this time, we had completed over 100 proof-of-concepts and pilots with customers, and the architecture challenges of security, scalability and performance had surfaced with these implementations. We had by then built a reference architecture that communicated the full suite of capabilities necessary for a full production scale implementation. We had also built deep knowledge in multiple platforms and implementing in mixed cloud and on-prem environments. But we knew we could do more to ensure consistency and speed for our customers. 

Disruption, the need for a change

The need was acutely apparent. Various teams across the globe pursued their own disparate ways of architecting and implementing, thus reinventing the wheel. Our team at Accenture had yet to become a collaborative ecosystem where we could learn from others’ mistakes or follow best practices uniformly.

We also saw multiple projects (inside and outside of Accenture) attempt to automate DLT deployments. The complexity around setting up a network, deploying it successfully and ensuring that network is up and running with all nodes communicating to each other seemed to be a challenge for the developer community. 

But each project within the blockchain ecosystem focused narrowly on their chosen DLT platform or cloud provider. Many focused only on quickly deploying development or proof-of-concept environments. Almost all wanted to commercialize their narrowly focused solution.

Outcome

We decided to start a project codenamed “Fulcrum” to simplify use of best practices and accelerate DLT deployments. Our vision was to bring down the technology barriers and thus drive adoption. From the very beginning we had open source in mind. 

We decided on some principles:

  • Design for security: Keys and other credentials are not stored in source, configuration files, environment variables, or filesystems
  • Modular Design: In order to provide an “enterprise” version, we should ensure that we are providing interfaces for modules where we might want to plug in a different component 
  • Conform to DLT Reference Architecture: When making decisions, conform to Accenture’s DLT Reference Architecture non-functional requirements and principles
  • Open Source Components: Ensure that we are using open source licensed products in our solution so that it may be contributed to Hyperledger, favoring Apache 2.0 licensed components
  • Infrastructure Independent: Choose tools and components that do not limit lock-in to an infrastructure configuration or cloud provider 
  • Choose Tools with Internal Expertise: Choose tools where Accenture has internal expertise to support and maintain

We then wrote down the problems we needed to solve while complying with the principles:

  1. How do we abstract the network complexities to let a developer majorly focus on application development? 
  2. How do we make it easy and consistent for the developers to deploy different blockchain networks? 
  3. How do we make it easy for the architects working on their first blockchain projects to design something secure, scalable, performing and easy to maintain?  
  4. How do we reduce the time taken in manual deployment from days to automated deployment in minutes?

Our customer conversations and Hyperledger community engagements helped us understand that these questions need to be answered not only at an organizational level but also at an industry/ecosystem level. For those familiar with building consortiums, it will be no surprise to hear that intellectual property concerns and fears of vendor lock-in can present major roadblocks in collaboration. Hence, we designed a solution that would not just accelerate adoption of the technology for Accenture customers, but would also be open source and accessible to all, simplifying  the deployment of the technology and accelerating adoption for the entire market. It was renamed to “Blockchain Automation framework” from its earlier name “Fulcrum” before it was open sourced. 

Now, as a Hyperledger Labs project, Blockchain Automation framework delivers automation for rapidly deploying production ready DLT platforms on a chosen cloud infrastructure. It consumes a single configuration file where we enlist all details such as the DLT platform of choice, cloud infra of choice, network details, the node details and application details etc. to deploy a working distributed network.

The architecture is basically an implementation of DLT reference architecture, hence conforming to best practices and providing a consistent mean to deploy regardless of cloud provider chosen, type of vault chosen and even the underlying DLT platform. Thus, making it easy for developers to focus on the application development. 

With multiple client implementations we have found out that it has on an average reduced 80% on the deployment time required through the automation. A single deployment that would take sometimes a couple of days can now be done in hours if not minutes, thus significantly accelerating the project implementation time.

What next?

There are many blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) solutions available across the market, from the major cloud service providers, to well-known software companies, to a host of new startups. Many of the solutions have been limited to a single cloud provider and/or a single DLT platform, and we see many are crossing the bridge in supporting multiple DLT platforms and interoperating across many clouds. We share this vision of a thriving community of BaaS providers built upon standards and interoperable platforms. 

Unfortunately, that vision is not quite a reality in all places today, and we see the Blockchain Automation Framework as an excellent complement to the existing BaaS solutions, providing more deployment options across a multi-cloud landscape. This is just the beginning of the evolution of a project within the Hyperledger greenhouse that simplifies the accessibility of many multiparty system technologies and allows organizations to select the best platform for their specific needs, with the ability to change over time. 

We welcome all suggestions, contributions and collaborations to take Blockchain Automation Framework to the next level. To learn more about the lab, check out our previous blog for a tutorial overview. Ready to get started? Please visit our landing page on Wiki to get all the details on how to collaborate with us.

May 14
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New to the Hyperledger Labs: Pluggable Hedera Consensus Service

By Donald Thibeau, Director of Product Management, Hedera Hashgraph Blog, Hyperledger Labs

The Hyperledger Labs Stewards recently approved the Pluggable Hedera Consensus Service Hyperledger Lab. The Lab, developed by Hedera with input from Hyperledger Fabric community members and maintainers, enables a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network to connect to the Hedera Consensus Service running on the Hedera public network. 

For those unfamiliar, Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger network, operated by the Hedera Governing Council. Council members include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, FIS Worldpay, Google, IBM, Magazineluiza, Nomura, Swirlds, Swisscom Blockchain, Tata Communications, and Wipro. The Hedera network supports four publicly accessible network services: Cryptocurrency, File Service, Smart Contract, and the aforementioned Consensus Service.

The Hedera Consensus Service provides an Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant order of transactions that cannot be manipulated or crash due to the action of any small group of actors. Effectively providing your Hyperledger Fabric network with a verifiable auditable log of all transactions validated by an impartial decentralized network. The plug-in can also enable multiple Fabric networks to receive consensus timestamps from a single, decentralized ordering service.

The plug-in included in the Hyperledger Lab allows the Hyperledger Fabric BYFN (Build Your First Network) sample to connect each Fabric orderer to the Hedera Consensus Service. The orderers submit endorsed transactions to Hedera using the Consensus Service by referencing a common topic ID and independently subscribing to the stream of ordered transactions. The orderers then use the ordered transaction to create a block for their organization’s peer.

Any developer can get up and running with the Hedera Consensus Service today by following the instructions provided in the Lab’s open source GitHub repo: https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/pluggable-hcs/blob/master/first-network/README.md 

It will require a Hedera testnet account, which you can sign-up for at http://portal.hedera.com/. The sample then configures the Fabric network dependencies, connecting the orderers to the public testnet.

We hope that the Hyperledger Lab is only the start of our journey in the Hyperledger community. We’d appreciate any feedback and contributions you have as we look to continue to support users of the Hedera Consensus Service building with Hyperledger Fabric. In the future, we hope to expand upon this plug-in with support for the likes of Hyperledger Avalon and the Blockchain Interoperability Framework.

Nov 20
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Accenture Open Sources Blockchain Integration Framework as a Hyperledger Lab

By Tracy A. Kuhrt, Senior Technical Architect, Accenture Blog, Hyperledger Labs

The growth in the number of blockchain platforms is booming. That is a good thing. Looking beyond a “one size fits all” platform sparks new possibilities and may lead to platform innovations we have yet to imagine. But the ecosystems developing around platforms must also interact for blockchain to achieve its full potential. 

With the future state of interoperability as an end goal, last year Accenture announced that we developed and tested two solutions that allow two or more blockchain enabled ecosystems to integrate. Since then, we developed a new solution specifically created for permissioned blockchains that works without a central connector node. I am happy to announce that we open sourced this new solution as Blockchain Integration Framework, a Hyperledger Lab.

Blockchain Integration Framework defines a communication model that lets permissioned blockchain ecosystems exchange any on-chain data or custom assets, independent of the platform. Specifically, it introduces an “interoperability validator” overlay network for each of the blockchain networks for which you want to exchange assets. Interoperability validators are known or broadly discoverable by the ecosystem and typically participants already taking part in the governance or consensus. 

High-Level Workflow

Interoperability validators will collectively handle export requests from local nodes by verifying against their version of the ledger (steps 1 to 3). Each request is answered by a (configurable) minimum quorum of validator signatures (steps 4 and 5). The network can continue working even if some validators are down or not participating, assuming the minimum quorum can be guaranteed. Any secure off-chain communication system can deliver messages certified by a distributed ledger’s transfer validators (step 6). A proof coming from a foreign distributed ledger can be verified against the public keys of the transfer validators of that foreign distributed ledger either locally by the recipient or using on-chain logic – typically smart-contracts (step 7 and 8).

This tutorial demonstrates how to transfer a simple asset between a Hyperledger Fabric and a Quorum network. If you have a favorite DLT network, please consider contributing a connector. We encourage you to have a look at the source code and welcome any contributions no matter the size. Please reach out on the #blockchain-integration-framework chat channel with any questions.

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