Hyperledger Quilt Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Mar 15

Helping A Community Grow By Pruning Inactive Projects

By Ry Jones and David Boswell, Community Architects Blog, Governance, Hyperledger Avalon, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner, Hyperledger Quilt

It may sound counterintuitive, but removing projects from an open source community is a critical part of helping that community grow. All projects have a life cycle, and it is natural, even for highly successful projects, to have development slow down or for user adoption to peak and then decline. Life cycle planning happens inside of companies that produce proprietary software and should be part of open source community management plans as well.

There are advantages that come from monitoring the status of projects and taking steps to wind down a project when projects become inactive. For example, it lowers the barrier to entry for people with innovative ideas. These ideas may or may not work out, and there should be no stigma around trying something that might fail. The alternative is to only accept new ideas that you feel are guaranteed to work out and that have enough resources dedicated to keep a project going indefinitely. That approach will limit what new projects can get started in your community. As Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said about projects becoming inactive: “It’s a good reminder, though, that if we are not losing sometimes, we are not making enough bets and pushing hard enough.”

Removing inactive projects also helps create clear pathways to connect potential users and contributors to the projects that are active. In the early days of open source, people coming into a community had an easier time navigating their way to projects where they can add value.

As open source development has become accepted in more and more industries, the landscape has become more complex. The Octoverse 2022 report states that there were a staggering 52 million new open source projects started by developers on GitHub last year alone. Sorting through this amount of code can be an overwhelming experience that can be eased by archiving those projects that are no longer under development.

There is also little downside to winding down a project because the code is still available and can be reactivated if people choose to do so. Ending a project can even prompt people who were using a project to become contributors. For people using open source code, it may seem like your contribution isn’t needed when maintainers are doing development and creating regular releases. However, if development stops on a project you rely on, it can be a good reminder that open source communities are driven by people with an interest in and a need for a project. We’ve seen this happen with Hyperledger Explorer. When the original maintainers had a shift in priorities that took them away from the project, it was archived because no one else stepped in to keep it going. As soon as it was wound down, we heard several people say “Hey, I was using that,” which gave us a chance to talk with them about how they could restart and contribute to the project.

How Pruning Happens At The Hyperledger Foundation

Hyperledger Foundation is hosted by the Linux Foundation where pruning inactive projects is considered a best practice. For instance, CNCF has archived projects before, stating that the process of reviewing project activity and winding down inactive projects is a sign of a healthy open source community. In this post, we will look in more detail about how the process happens in the Hyperledger community, but the process will be fairly similar with small differences for other communities.

Hyperledger’s Technical Oversight Committee is in charge of making decisions about each step of the lifecycle of a project – including starting a new project as well as deciding to end of life projects.

TOC members need data to make their decisions so they ask all projects to submit quarterly reports about the status of their work. In cases where maintainers mention plans to end development in their report, it can lead to a straightforward discussion between TOC members and project maintainers where they decide to wind down a project. If a project becomes inactive and there is no one to submit a report, that is also a clear signal that a project may be inactive. TOC members have tools to investigate project status, including LFX Insights, Orbit and a tool to show the last commit on the default branch.

Before 2022, the TOC had decided just once to end-of-life a project when they archived Hyperledger Composer in April 2020. As the Hyperledger Foundation has matured and more new projects have been started, we’ve also seen an increase in archiving projects. In 2022, Hyperledger moved four projects to end-of-life status: Hyperledger Avalon, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Explorer and Hyperledger Quilt.

If you have been using any of these projects or are interested in the code, please feel free to take a look and reach out to us (email to: community-architects@) if you’re interested in restarting development. For instance, Hyperledger Explorer has been restarted as the blockchain-explorer lab, and people are looking into how to restart development to shape the direction of the code to meet their needs. If you’re interested in connecting with people to discuss next steps with blockchain-explorer feel free to join the #blockchain-explorer channel on Hyperledger’s Discord server.

When we archive a project, it gets much less attention than when a new project launches, so we hope this post has given more attention to the projects that have been moved to end-of-life status and explains the decision making process behind these changes.

Nov 01

Love0

Announcing Hyperledger Quilt v1.0: Interledger for the Java platform

By David Fuelling, Sr. Software Engineering Manager at Ripple/Xpring and maintainer of Hyperledger Quilt Blog, Hyperledger Quilt

Today, I’m thrilled to announce Hyperledger Quilt v1.0, a Java implementation of the Interledger protocol that enables payments across any payment network.

Much like the Internet did for information, Interledger provides open protocols and standards to enable payments interoperability — across any currency, fiat or crypto — with no single company or organization controlling the Interledger. Instead, by specifying a common set of protocols to follow, the Interledger will consist of a variety of entities and institutions who can decide which other Interledger networks to connect to.

An Open Collaboration for Java Developers

Because no single entity will own the Interledger, it makes sense for Interledger software implementations to be free and open-source. To this end, Quilt is hosted in the Hyperledger community, which provides a strong governance structure to help the Quilt implementation mature, and also has a rich set of business blockchain technologies and partners that will benefit immensely from a payments interoperability layer.

Hyperledger Quilt and Interledger have major developer backing from a variety of organizations, most importantly Xpring.

At Xpring, we’re creating an open platform for developers to integrate money into their apps.

Central to this vision is Interledger, and we’re investing heavily in tools and services (like an Interledger Testnet and more) to enable anyone to also build payment systems using Interledger technologies. Xpring’s platform is built to foster innovation in blockchain to interoperate “all the money” with the launch of Quilt v1.0 – a Java implementation of Interledger.

Which brings us back to Quilt, and its foundation on Java.

While it’s just one programming language in the Interledger ecosystem, Java is an immensely important one. There are millions of Java developers around the world, with billions of devices running Java software, largely led by Android deployments. With this in mind, Quilt is vital because it provides Java developers with easy-to-use libraries for sending and receiving Interledger payments.

With the 1.0 release of Hyperledger Quilt, the Java ecosystem now has a support for nearly all Intereldger primitives, including streaming payments.

In the rest of this post, I want to explain some of these core primitives and features, and walk you through how to send an Interledger payment from a Java application using Quilt. So let’s get started!

Tutorial: How to Send an Interledger Payment using Quilt

First, let’s talk about identity. Every Interledger sender will need to know who to pay, and for that we use the Payment Pointer: a standardized identifier for payment accounts. Because payment pointers are made up of string characters, you don’t need to fully understand everything about them in order to use them. For this example, we’ll simply be making a payment to this Payment Pointer:

`$rs3.xpring.dev/accounts/user_usio37ti/spsp`

The above payment pointer represents an account on the Xpring testnet, and indicates the user `user_usio37ti` at the Connector hosted at https://rs3.xpring.dev.

Now that we know who to pay, we need to get an account that will represent us on the Interledger. To do this, we can create a test account by using the Xpring Interledger testnet here.

Once you have your account credentials, you’ll be able to easily send a payment using something like the following code snippets.

To get started with our payment, we need to create a `Link` using Quilt. Links allow two peers to communicate with each other. In this instance, you communicate to your Interledger service provider (think of this like your ISP) using a Link, and this gives you access to the broader Interledger.

For this example, we use HTTP for actual network communication, and construct a new Link of type `IlpOverHttpLink`:

```
Link link = new IlpOverHttpLink(
 // … actual dependencies here.
)
```

Next, we want to make an Interledger payment using STREAM, which is a packetized payment protocol inspired by the QUIC Internet Transport Protocol. STREAM operates on top of core Interledger protocols by allowing a sender and receiver to coordinate a payment over any arbitrary Interledger topology.

Similar to the way the Internet packetizes data, STREAM splits up payments into packets to maximize network liquidity and throughput. This allows Interledger to support a variety of use-cases, including micro-payments as well as large-value payments, machine-payments, non-custodial wallets, retail and ecommerce payments, and more.

In code, we can create a `StreamSender` that uses our `Link`, like this:

```
StreamSender simpleStreamSender = new SimpleStreamSender(link);
```

Finally, to send our test payment, the following line of Java can be used:

``` 
simpleStreamSender.sendMoney(
  SHARED_SECRET, SENDER_ADDRESS, RECEIVER_ADDRESS, UnsignedLong.valueOf(1000)
);
```

The above command instructs the StreamSender to send `1000` units across the Interledger to the receiver identified by `RECEIVER_ADDRESS`. Note that because the immediate peer of this sender is part of the Xpring testnet, these units are actually XRP milli-Drops (a Drop is a millionth of an XRP). Thus, while 1000 units will be sent by this payment, the payment will actually equate to only 1 Drop of XRP.

Quilt for Enterprise

As you can see above, sending payments over Interledger is pretty simple, although the code snippets in this post are truncated for illustration purposes. To see the actual code behind these examples, navigate over to the Hyperledger Quilt Examples on Github.

All of us at Hyperledger and Xpring are incredibly excited about the new platform we’re building on top of Interledger. It will be fun to see what gets built on top of Quilt, especially for enterprise DLT use-cases like connecting currently disconnected Fabric networks together using Interledger.

Developer showcase series: Raj Sadaye, Arizona State University

By Raj Sadaye Blog, Developer Showcase, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Quilt

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Raj Sadaye.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?

One piece of advice I would offer someone interested in getting started with blockchain is to start working on a project or an application using the technology that they want to learn. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate or a complicated application, but could be something that has utility in the real world. While working on it, they might face difficulties or technical setbacks. The best way to tackle this is to reach out to the community of several other developers who are currently maintaining/ working on that technology. We can learn a lot by working on a project and reading the documentation thoroughly.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on, and let us know what was it that made you want to get into blockchain?

My interest in blockchains developed when I was searching for a method to secure IoT device communication as well as make it de-centralized to increase speed. Blockchain technology turned out to be the perfect solution for this. Over the past 8 months, I’ve worked on several projects at Arizona State University’s Blockchain research Lab. In March 2018, I worked on building a PoC for a Carbon credits trading ecosystem using blockchain for Lightworks at ASU. The system enables various players of the market to control carbon emissions while maintaining sustainable growth by incentivizing carbon capturing actors. A brief description of this project can be found here. Currently, we’re working with the Center for Negative Emission of Carbon to design a way to verify capture as well as emission of carbon with minimal human intervention. My current research focus is developing a data sharing protocol that enables edge to edge communication in IoT devices. I’ve also been working on building the CSE 598: Engineering Blockchain Applications course on Coursera for Arizona State University.

What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

Primarily, I’ve been working with Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer and overall, the experience has been really good. Hyperledger Fabric has a good set of tools to build the infrastructure for a distributed ledger solution. The certification authority is a high-quality tool that helps us with cryptographic validation and dynamically assigning certificates for actors being added to the network. Once a person is familiar with the documentation, it’s really simple to go about building applications. Hyperledger Composer is a tool that excited me the most over the last 8 month because it runs on top of Hyperledger Fabric and it can help a blockchain novice on how to build a distributed application. Both frameworks have really good tutorial sections that help developers get familiar with the technology.

As Hyperledger’s incubated projects start maturing and hit 1.0s and beyond, what are the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result from your perspective?

In my opinion, supply chains and blockchain technology were always meant to go hand in hand. The most interesting app or use case that I’ve been recently come across is Everledger. Everledger rewires trust and confidence in a previously broken market by building consortiums of actors participating and maintaining provenance by supplementing blockchain technology with various other verification techniques. In the near future, I see other products also adopt such an architecture to avoid counterfeiting and adultery.

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

One issue I’m hoping to be solved using blockchain technology is verification of identity through digitization of personal documents. Verification of documents using hash-based fingerprinting assigning ownership of this digital record to the person rather than a centralized authority can help a lot in maintaining the privacy of data as well as avoiding frauds through detection of counterfeit documents being used.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in 5 years?

In 5 years, I expect blockchain technology to move over the crypto-hype and focus on the real applications and use cases that it be integrated with. For Hyperledger, the most interesting upcoming project, in my opinion, is Hyperledger Quilt which aims to achieve interoperability in blockchains. I’d also like to see a solution within the Hyperledger project that enables seamless integration of blockchain application with the existing infrastructure.

May 24

Love6

One Year Later: Interoperability & Standardization Shine at Consensus

By Hyperledger Blog, Events, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Quilt, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Image: The Hyperledger booth at Consensus 2018

Interoperability and standardization took center stage (literally) last week in New York at Consensus, when organizations like FedEx explained that both Ethereum and Hyperledger technology power their logistics solution and that it was a goal of theirs to be agnostic when choosing ledger technologies. Then there was the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which announced their 1.0 specification that many blockchain developer communities, including Hyperledger Sawtooth, plan to be compatible with in the near future.

It seems as though our hard work at Hyperledger has been paying off and Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf believes we’re now seeing evolution beyond the basic technology questions to more involved discussions about scale, interoperability and governance. In fact, he met with Steven Norton of The Wall Street Journal during Consensus to discuss just that. Brian told Steven:

“Now that we have running systems and there is real value on these different networks, figuring out how to wire them together is a greater priority now than it was a few years ago. But even outside the blockchain space, interoperability is always a process, never a destination. People are starting to finally ask how do we get out of a simplistic mode of saying everyone should all be on the same public ledger, and instead get to a more sophisticated set of questions, like what does interoperability actually mean. It might mean wiring these things together with common software underneath. It might also mean common software on top.”

The discussions around interoperability were a significant contrast to what we saw one year ago at Consensus, when many were just trying to wrap their minds around the technology capabilities and experimentation was in full swing. The idea of different blockchains interacting with one another still seemed like several years away. At that time, we only saw a glimpse of potential possibilities for interoperability when the HACERA team created a fun chess game called Dutchess at the Building Blocks Hackathon that used a combination of technologies like Ethereum, Solidity, Quorum, and Hyperledger Sawtooth.

Jonathan Levi from HACERA explaining different technologies powering Dutchess

At Hyperledger, we envision a world of many chains, some public like the crypto-currencies and some permissioned like you will see in healthcare settings. That’s why we focus on developing the common frameworks for building all kinds of chains. Our diverse developer communities remain diligent in helping the industry advance interoperability above the layer of the DLT, and are on constant look out for simple and open cross-blockchain approaches. An early example of this was the integration between the Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Burrow projects last year. As a result of that integration, simple EVM smart contracts can be deployed to Hyperledger Sawtooth using the “Seth” (Sawtooth Ethereum) Transaction Family.

“This integration validates that positioning and establishes a strong upstream-downstream relationship between the Sawtooth and Burrow projects. Successful open source endeavours are community driven, collaborative efforts and this linkage between the Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Burrow teams reinforces that ethos.” – Adam Ludvik, Bitwise IO & Casey Kuhlman, Monax

Building on that development, the Hyperledger Sawtooth community released a feature called Dynamic Consensus, which goes beyond pluggable consensus to allow networks to change consensus on the fly. Hyperledger Sawtooth supports three consensus protocols right now and two more are in development. Also in development, is a change to the Sawtooth consensus API that will allow consensus providers written in a variety of languages. This follows a similar pattern to Sawtooth’s support for smart contracts in a variety of languages. This expands the breadth of possible consensus algorithm andprotocols that can be easily coupled to Sawtooth. A more recent example is the Hyperledger Fabric community, which has been working hard to create a bridge to the Ethereum community, so that developers can write EVM smart contracts on Fabric. The hope is that our community will continue to tighten integration and interoperability across Hyperledger projects and beyond, allowing a greater number of available options for developers. We hope that even more developers can start to think out of the box, connecting blockchains, and doing it securely. The problem of working with more than one technology stack is no longer a technical one.

Community Architect, Tracy Kuhrt presenting at the Hyperledger NYC Meetup after Consensus

Hyperledger was established to bring together related, and even competing, technologies with the expectation that the common governance will lead to interoperability and gradual consolidation. Interoperability will be essential to the widespread adoption of blockchain technology because that is what will help the blockchain business ecosystem standardize and thrive. As Brian mentioned to The Wall Street Journal, standards are hard, but getting everyone to agree will end up being the bigger challenge:

“I think the tech is ready for the volume of transactions people want to throw at it and the flexibility of programming models that they want. It’s really the governance. It’s hard enough for one organization to launch any new product. Getting multiple parties to agree on anything — like a time of day for a meeting, let alone a common application — will end up being a bigger challenge. Standards are hard. These things are alive and humming like a benzene ring. They depend upon everybody running the right thing at all times. That I think operationally will be the big challenge.” – Brian Behlendorf

We look forward to the rest of 2018 and all the progress to be made with interoperability. We hope you join us in the effort by contributing to Hyperledger projects.

You can plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. As always, you can keep up with what’s new with Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.

Dec 21

Love13

Onward and Upward for Hyperledger in 2018

By Brian Behlendorf Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Chaintool, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Quilt, Hyperledger Sawtooth

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s beneficial to look back and reflect on the progress we have made, and where we will see evolution and growth in the new year. This year, the world has acknowledged distributed ledgers and smart contracts as transformative technologies with tremendous potential to impact how business is conducted in many industries. Within Hyperledger, the technology foundations have now been set. In the coming year, that will turn into more production software releases, real world implementations, and the first real business returns on our collective intellectual and financial investment.

Below are a few observations from the year, milestones and thoughts on what will come in 2018.

Blockchain maturation and more production implementations

Companies large and small, IT vendors and end-user organizations, consortiums and NGOs, everyone took notice of Hyperledger in 2017 and made moves to get involved. This was evident in the ever increasing Hyperledger membership, which nearly doubled in size. We sold out of our Premier memberships at 21 total, adding eight new companies just this year including SAP, American Express, Daimler, Change Healthcare, NEC, Cisco, Tradeshift and Baidu. Hyperledger now has support from 197 organizations, and remains the fastest growing open source project ever hosted by The Linux Foundation. This has given Hyperledger a very solid footing financially, enabling us to double the resources we can apply towards building and supporting the community in 2018.
We have grown our Associate Member ranks to include organizations as diverse as Mercy Corps, the National Association of Realtors, the Illinois Blockchain Initiative, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. These relationships are key to extending Hyperledger’s reach into different sectors and environments.
Attesting to our focus on developing code suitable for enterprise use, this year saw the launch of the first production ready Hyperledger blockchain framework, Hyperledger Fabric 1.0. This was a true community effort pulling together contributions from more than 100 different developers and 30 different companies. As one result, we have 45 members listed in our Vendor Directory, providing products and services based on Hyperledger technology.
We have seen substantial uptick in POCs, pilots and production implementations of Hyperledger technologies, many of which are being tracked at the PoC Tracker on the Hyperledger website. Just a few examples of projects building in Hyperledger code include:
- The Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Ubin, implementing an RTGS system;
- the soon-to-be-production diamond supply chain tracking system implemented by Everledger, SAP and IBM;
- and the Plastic Bank, a plastics recycling initiative.

In 2018, we will see:

more 1.0 milestones made next year by various Hyperledger projects;
more production deployments: for example, Change Healthcare, has announced an early 2018 go-live for their claims processing blockchain built on Hyperledger Fabric;
a growing Hyperledger staff and presence at events, creating more content, supporting a growing set of projects and working groups;
and more membership growth. We are reaching out to a broader set of industries than ever, and are deepening our relationships with our existing members.

The fast expanding developer and end-user community will continue to grow

Demand for developers, and developer interest in Hyperledger, has exploded. We are now seeing sold-out Hyperledger meetups in dozens of cities, strong attendance at our semi-monthly HackFests held around the world, thousands of participants on our email and chat networks, non-stop requests for speakers at conferences, and of course more and more code flowing into our repositories.
We launched the first Hyperledger online training course this year: Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies. Currently, there are 44,966 total enrollments, and 1,074 learners have completed the course with a passing grade. We have an average of 2,500 new enrollments per week. The course is second only in growth to the original intro to Linux operating system course launched by The Linux Foundation. We have now launched a Training and Education Working Group to involve core maintainers and other volunteers in the development of additional courseware.
150 people participated in the Hyperledger Member Summit in November in Singapore, representing 83 different member companies.

In 2018, we will see:

the development of additional training courses and certification options;
more frequent and larger face to face developer gatherings;
and more developer activity across additional Hyperledger projects.

Integration, standards and interoperability will take center focus

In 2017, the community started exploring integrations among different Hyperledger technologies like Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Burrow. We’re betting this collaboration and exploration will continue next year. The Hyperledger technical steering committee also accepted four new projects into incubation in 2017 including Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Composer and Hyperledger Quilt. Quilt, in particular, is focused on enabling interoperability in a multi-blockchain world. We are anticipating that more such projects will call Hyperledger home next year.
The Hyperledger Scalability and Performance Working Group was launched in June to facilitate important conversations. Various other efforts such as the new Blockchain Interoperability Alliance were created to advance standards that will hopefully promote a greater degree of connectivity between different blockchains in 2017.

In 2018, we will see:

The industry get a lot more serious about interoperability above the layer of the DLT, and looking for simple and open cross-blockchain approaches, leading them to Hyperledger Quilt and the rest of our community;
and our projects explore integration and interoperability with each other even further, allowing a greater number of options to be available to developers.

We’re proud of the work our vibrant and diverse community has accomplished this year. We have made great strides and could not be more thankful to everyone who has played a part in this success. It goes without saying the stakes can be even higher in open source, it’s a balance of creating a welcoming, collaborative environment and at the same time making sure everyone gets a say and all voices are heard. We strongly believe the open governance model that Hyperledger naturally inherited from The Linux Foundation has been a crucial part of the continued success of the project.

Finally, you can stay up to date with all Hyperledger news here or follow us on Twitter. We hold regular hackfests for Hyperledger, so be sure to check out the events page and join us for the next one. You can also plug into the Hyperledger Community at github, Rocket.Chat, the wiki or our mailing list.

Here’s to a successful 2018!

Dec 05

Love8

Developer Showcase Series: Nathan Aw, NTT DATA

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Quilt

Our Developer Showcase blog series serves to highlight the work and motivations of developers, users and researchers collaborating on Hyperledger’s incubated projects. Next up is Nathan Aw, who is a Digital Advisory & Solutions Manager, of Emerging Technologies & Innovation Practice at NTT DATA.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?

Build software like how we build our houses. Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered. Programmers and software engineers seldom do – perhaps this is why programs crash more often than houses collapse?

In practical terms, it means… spend a lot of time on writing (thinking) specifications, devising blueprints. For programmers who are building on top of say Hyperledger Fabric, read and understand the protocol specifications. Thereafter write your own specifications for your program. I cannot over emphasize the importance of clarity of thought before one starts building on Hyperledger.

Nathan Aw, NTT Data

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on, and let us know what was it that made you want to get into blockchain?

I am working on Hyperledger Quilt. I got into blockchain purely by chance. Back in college my favorite Computer Science (CS) modules were distributed systems and cryptography (hashing, digital signatures, public-key cryptosystems). When I graduated, I found myself working on middleware (Integration – SOA, AMQP, OSB, etc). When blockchain arrived at the scene, all the stars aligned – I suddenly found my favorite subjects in school and my experience in middleware aligned.

What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

Hyperledger Quilt. Amazing community – full of passionate folks who are willing to lend a helping hand. The mailing list is so responsive.

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

Cross chain interoperability. scalability and security.

As Hyperledger’s incubated projects start maturing and hit 1.0s and beyond, what are the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result from your perspective?

I find the use cases of diamond supply chain and verifiable IDs for refugees most interesting.

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

I hope blockchain can help usher in a new age of trustless paradigm. People no longer need to trust organizations but instead trust the software, the cryptographic proof, the process. Blockchain ideally should bring people closer than before – collaboration and cooperation for the betterment of mankind.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in 5 years?

I hope to see blockchain deployed in all the major industries, the major sectors and on a global scale.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

Build Software like how we build our houses!

What technology could you not live without?

Blockchain – To be more specific, Hyperledger. (I mean it!)

Nathan Aw Ming Kun is a Digital Advisory & Solutions Manager with NTT Data whose primary focus is on Blockchain technologies and other fast emerging technologies such as Robotics Process Automation (RPA). In his current role, he designs and delivers blockchain solutions for his clients. He is also an active participant in the open source collaborative ecosystem such as the Hyperledger Project, among many others. His passion is to help organisations quickly identify, adopt and scale digital technologies thereby pushing the digital frontier and capturing its full value. Nathan Aw brings with him 6 years of enterprise software and implementation experience from leading companies such as NTT Data, Accenture and Oracle.

Oct 16

Love3

Hyperledger Gets Cozy With Quilt

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Quilt

We’re thrilled to welcome yet another project under Hyperledger, Quilt. Hyperledger Quilt started around 18 months ago and is a Java implementation of the Interledger protocol. Interledger, also known as ILP, is a protocol for making transactions across ledgers. The protocol’s standards and specifications are being defined by the open source community under the World Wide Web Consortium umbrella. With the addition of Quilt to Hyperledger, the Linux Foundation now hosts both the Java (Quilt) and JavaScript (Interledger.js) Interledger implementations. The JS Foundation welcomed Interledger.js in 2016.

As an open consortium, Hyperledger incubates a range of business blockchain technologies, including distributed ledger frameworks, smart contract engines, client libraries, graphical interfaces, utility libraries and sample applications. Quilt is the latest project to join this vast community.

What is Hyperledger Quilt?

Hyperledger Quilt offers interoperability between ledger systems by implementing ILP, which is primarily a payments protocol and is designed to transfer value across systems – both distributed ledgers and non-distributed ledgers. It is a simple protocol that establishes a global namespace for accounts, as well as, a protocol for synchronized atomic swaps between different systems.

Why Quilt?

Ledger systems today are siloed and disconnected. Transfers of value are relatively easy within one country, or if the sender and recipient have accounts on the same network or ledger. But sending value to someone on a different network or ledger is complex and often impractical. Where connections between ledgers do exist, they are manual, slow or expensive.

The Interledger protocol is based on concepts dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, but it took the advent of Bitcoin and the global blockchain movement to make the world realize that money and value transfers could be reinvented with Internet based technologies.

Internet protocols enable information to be packetized, routed and delivered over communication networks. With ILP, money and other forms of value can be packetized, routed and delivered over payment networks and ledgers. Hyperledger Quilt is an enterprise grade implementation of the protocol, developed in Java, and providing libraries and reference implementations of the core Interledger components and in time ledger integrations for other Hyperledger projects.

Technical Details of Quilt

The idea is that Quilt will become a ledger interoperability solution for Hyperledger projects. This will enable Hyperledger members’ distributed ledger solutions, financial institutions’ private ledgers, IoT companies’ wallets, and supply chain systems to connect with one another to perform distributed atomic transactions.

By implementing the Interledger protocol, Quilt provides:

A set of rules for enabling ledger interoperability with basic escrow semantics
A standard for a ledger-independent address format and data packet format that will enable connectors to route payments
A framework for designing higher level use-case-specific protocols

Who will work on Quilt?

Everis, NTT DATA and Ripple are committing full-time engineering resources to ensure the success of this project. The main contributors will include Takahiro Inaba (NTT DATA), Adrian Hope-Bailie (Ripple) and Isaac Arruebarrena (Everis, an NTT DATA Company).

Many other members have already expressed interest in backing the development of Quilt’s Java implementation. This team will seek to work with the other Hyperledger projects in order to find ways to enable ledger interoperability across Hyperledger’s DLT solutions and institutions’ centralised ledgers. Other engineers from NTT DATA, Everis and Ripple will also contribute to the project over time. Members of the Interledger Payments Community Group have also shown interest in contributing to the development of this ILP implementation.

Getting started with Quilt

There will be repositories on GitHub to manage Quilt resources – they will become available over the next several weeks. You can watch for them here: hyperledger/quilt and hyperledger/quilt-crypto-conditions.

Quilt is an exciting addition for the Hyperledger community. As always, we encourage developers to join our efforts on Quilt as well as other projects, via github, Rocket.Chat, the wiki or the mailing lists. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter or email us with any questions: info@hyperledger.org.

Hyperledger Quilt