Hyperledger Iroha Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Dec 21

#HyperledgerSocialImpact: Highlighting Hyperledger-powered solutions driving change

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha

There’s no better time of year to reflect on the power of technology to improve lives so we are celebrating #HyperledgerSocialImpact month. Organizations of all sizes and types are levering Hyperledger technologies to power solutions that are driving real change. The impact ranges from boosting financial inclusion to tackling climate change and sustainable and equitable business practices to increasing access to healthcare, education and more

Read on for just a sampling of the solutions powered by Hyperledger technologies that at work for the greater good.

Bakong (and beyond): CBDC payment data for credit underwriting in emerging economies

Access to credit is crucial for micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to share in growth, especially in emerging economies. However, they often lack the records needed to verify creditworthiness. Hyperledger contributor SORAMITSU has learned firsthand the challenges faced by emerging-market MSMEs and lending institutions alike through its work on Bakong, the National Bank of Cambodia’s blockchain-based digital currency and payment infrastructure.

As a finalist in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Global CBDC Challenge, SORAMITSU designed an app capable of querying payment data relevant to credit underwriting. The app is designed for Bakong—which is built using Hyperledger Iroha—but could overlay any DLT-based payment system. Lenders could use the app to query data that are relevant to a given wallet’s creditworthiness, such as payments volume, regularity and geographical area of incoming and outgoing payments, and monthly average balance. Importantly, the app only allows queries to be designed in Boolean (true/false) format, and requires approval (a cryptographic signature) from the wallet being queried. By allowing lenders to query wallets under strict conditions of data minimization and informed consent, the application enables accurate underwriting, while mitigating the risk of data monopolization and threats to privacy. SORAMITSU will draw on the lessons learned in the MAS Challenge throughout its work on CBDC apps and functions targeting social impact worldwide—including in its new cooperation with the central bank of Laos.

Circulor: Transparency for conflict and critical minerals sourcing in the electronics and electric vehicle supply chain

Demand for raw materials such as cobalt, tantalum, and tungsten, which are critical to electronics and electric vehicle battery manufacturing, grows exponentially. Large quantities of these minerals come from Central Africa, where human rights organizations report extremely bad working conditions and cases of child labor. In 2014, UNICEF reported that there were as many as 40,000 child miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone. Amnesty International, meanwhile, reports that the cobalt industry is rampant with illegal and unethical practices. This results in increased pressure on manufacturers to ensure the ethical sourcing of their raw materials and full visibility into their supply chains. Leveraging Hyperledger Fabric and the Oracle Blockchain Platform, Circulor builds solutions to track minerals provenance and CO2 emissions and also improve efficiency in complex global supply chains. EV manufacturers like Volvo, Polestar, Mercedes-Benz and others who’ve committed to ethical sourcing utilize Circulor’s solution to track vital information about the authenticity and sourcing of raw materials—from mining and refining to actual use in battery units of the cars rolling off the assembly line.

INDETAIL: Socially conscious projects on the foundation of blockchain networks

INDETAIL, based in the Japanese city of Sapporo, is spearheading the global development of blockchain distributed ledger networks, working with investment-worthy partners on innovative, socially conscious projects. Among INDETAIL’s projects leveraging the Hyperledger Fabric-based Oracle Blockchain Platform are a token-based electric transportation system for seniors; a joint effort with Hokkaido Electric Power on electric vehicle charging stations in rural areas; an automated multilingual smart check-in service “maneKEY” for accommodation facilities; and the Riso Card, a digital wallet that supports online currencies and enables fingerprint identification.

Jyoti – Fair Works: Blockchain tech to help keep “fair fashion” in style

Jyoti – Fair Works is leveraging a Hyperledger Fabric-powered solution to give customers a view into its humanitarian supply chain. From its start, the company has made supply chain transparency part of its fair fashion brand. However, as demand has grown in recent years, Jyoti – Fair Works found its downstream supplier network was difficult to track. To maintain that transparency and to better explain it to the company’s customers, Jyoti – Fair Works has started using a blockchain application built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform by retraced, a participant in the Oracle for Startups program. By mapping its supply chain data—including certified details about the cotton growers, textile manufacturers, fabric dyers, designers, and seamstresses—in retraced’s application, Jyoti – Fair Works can update order, delivery, and production schedules and then create, print, and affix QR codes to both physical and digital garment tags.

KrypC Environmental Footprint Tracker: Showing consumers each bottles carbon and water footprint

KrypC has partnered with Heineken for a pilot blockchain program to show consumers each bottles’ carbon and water footprint. Imagine finding out the environmental footprint of your beer bottle by just one click! Hyperledger Fabric helped make this realistic by tackling the challenge of realizing full transparency over the hundreds of thousands of farmers in Heineken’s global supply chain. Consumers through this pilot were able to scan their bottle and view its actual journey as well as its environmental impact.

Oceanworks and Keep Sea Blue: Traceability of recycled plastics used in making consumer and industrial goods

Powered by Oracle Blockchain technology based on Hyperledger Fabric, Oceanworks and Keep Sea Blue provide traceability platforms and certifications that are used to encourage effective plastic waste collections from oceans and beaches, linked to sustainable reuse and certification of products made from the recycled materials. Oceanworks uses Oracle’s Intelligent Track & Trace SaaS application, and Keep Sea Blue uses a custom application built directly on the blockchain platform. Both companies have implemented monitoring processes that connect the plastics value chain—collectors, recyclers, manufacturers, brand owners—to track the journey of plastic waste, creating a transparent digital audit trail of the recycled material, and ensuring end-to-end recycled product transparency and traceability.

Symbridge: Building a market of trust

Envision this: A marketplace where there is trust and transparency. For a free market to operate truly efficiently, transparency is a vital ingredient. Transparency and trust are becoming increasingly important to investors who demand ready access to information, having been taken advantage of too many times or been shocked by headlines that have impacted their portfolio or their expectations for doing business with a company. In an industry like crypto where the market remains highly volatile, regulators are rightfully concerned for the consumer in being able to understand all risks involved.

Symbridge is the first of its kind digital asset exchange looking to change this. Built on the fundamentals of trust, innovation, and transparency, Symbridge combines all the security, efficiency, transparency, and accuracy of a decentralized exchange with the high-frequency and low-latency trading of traditional exchanges. Licensed in the United States, the Symbridge validation network, which was built using Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, solves for these issues and helps to build a market of trust. All transactions that have taken place on the blockchain are visible to users of Symbridge’s blockchain explorer, allowing for full auditability. This creates a scenario in which investors can feel confident they are aligned with a company that shares their values and is willing to promote further positive impacts across the industry.

Join the conversation using #HyperledgerSocialImpact on social channels. Or get involved with the Social Impact Special Interest Group.

Cover photo by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

Jul 19

Love1

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

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Global Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other sessions of interest from Hyperledger Global Forum on the subject:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Hyperledger Global Forum

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

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

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

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

Nov 30

Love0

#HyperledgerAsia: Hyperledger-powered production solutions making an impact across Asia now

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

Enterprise blockchain has a global reach, and Hyperledger has a very active and innovative international community. This month, we are spotlighting solutions members have put into production through Asia that are transforming everything from digital payments and bond exchanges to supply chain, telecom, healthcare and security systems.

Read on for details about a range of #HyperledgerAsia solutions that are making an impact in markets across Asia now:

Bakong

National Bank of Cambodia officially launched Bakong — a multi-stakeholder system that enables instant and final transactions using digital Cambodian Riel (KHR) or United States Dollars (USD). Co-developed by the National Bank of Cambodia and Japanese/Swiss fintech company SORAMITSU based on Hyperledger Iroha, it is built to handle the needs of numerous banks and 17 million consumers.

BondEvalue BondbloX Bond Exchange

BondEvalue has been approved as a Recognised Market Operator (RMO) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It operates BondbloX Bond Exchange (BBX), the world’s first blockchain-based bond exchange to bring trading of a wide range of fixed-income securities to the mass market across the region.

BondEvalue officially graduated from the MAS’ regulatory sandbox on October 1, 2020. The move means that BondEvalue has successfully concluded proof of technology and business model. It is now no longer bound by restrictions such as limits on trading volume and disclosures specific to the sandbox model.

BBX allows for bonds to be traded in smaller sizes of US$1,000 unlike typical bond trades of at least US$200,000. This leads to better access and better diversification opportunities for a market that is typically inaccessible except to more wealthy investors.

BBX leverages the Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain technology to fractionlize bonds, make trading highly transparent and more cost effective. Settlement on BBX is on a T+0 basis, that is within seconds instead of the normal two-day settlement cycle, thereby reducing counterparty settlement risks for investors.

dltledgers’ “plug-and-play” platform for cross-border trade and supply chain digitization

The current trade finance system is in dire need of an upgrade. Today’s operations between all involved parties are complex, costly, labor intensive, and inefficient. Also, in the aftermath of the global pandemic, it has become even more critical to shift entirely from a paper-heavy, manual business to digital.

dltledgers used Hyperledger Fabric to create the world’s leading “plug-and-play” platform for cross-border trade and supply chain digitization. All parties’ digital trades in the supply chain are recorded on the platform, providing banks the ability to go paperless and process payments seamlessly for LC issuance and trade finance quickly.

Currently, #dltledgers processes $100 – $150 million in trade finance per month, involving about 400 traders in which 20+ are large enterprises. About 45+ banks have joined the network to facilitate trade financing with prominent names such as ANZ, ADCB, DBS and TDB. To date, #dltledgers has processed more than S$3.2 billion in trade finance via its blockchain platform.

Hala System’s Sentry

Hala Systems is using Hyperledger Fabric alongside Hedera as part of its Sentry early warning system, which helps protect 2M+ people in Syria. Hala Systems uses both Hyperledger Fabric and Hedera to manage the metadata of user inputted and created media produced in conflict. The hashed metadata is simultaneously written to a private blockchain built on an IBM Blockchain Platform powered by Hyperledger Fabric and to Hedera Consensus Service. Hala Systems uses the IBM Blockchain Platform to act as its internal repository, preserving additional metadata to augment the auditable hash data sent to Hedera Consensus Service. With these two sets of records, any 3rd party can verify the information on the public ledger to match the image and, if necessary, its accompanying data stored on the private ledger.

MediConCen’s Blockchain Medical Ecosystem

Named as the Winner of Hong Kong’s “2020 Digital Disruptor” at the IDC Digital Transformation Awards (DXa) 2020, MediConCen simplifies medical insurance claims for medical community, insurers, and general customers using Hyperledger blockchain.

Traditional insurance systems require insured customers to present their physical card at the clinic, mail-in their medical receipts and claims for approval, followed by complicated administrative duties and time-consuming settlement procedures that many detest. Built on Hyperledger Fabric, MediConCen’s solution is the first blockchain medical ecosystem in Hong Kong, aimed at liberalizing the walled network to enhance the expected medical coverage, as well as greatly relieving clerical duties.

By automating the claim process through digital signatures and smart contracts, patients simply display their unique QR code for clinics to scan, thus revealing the corresponding plan and medical service they would provide. Offering efficiency and transparency to all parties involved with a complete and unique set of general ledgers and encrypting data of personal information to eliminate risks of leakage under the application of blockchain technology. This platform currently connects 200+ medical providers and 200,000+ medical insurance clients in Hong Kong.

Tech Mahindra’s plug-n-play solution to curb spam calls

By 2018, the spam call situation had grown grim in India, a country with more than 1 billion active mobile subscribers, causing bad customer experience and propagating of fake news and financial scams. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) acknowledged UCC (Unsolicited Commercial Communication) or spam calls were a major nuisance to telecom subscribers across the country and a growing menace that needed to be tackled with immediate effect. Though TRAI had established a “Do Not Disturb” (DND) list in 2010 with more than 230 million subscribers on it, unregistered telemarketers continue to spam customers, obtaining their consent through fraudulent and questionable tactics. Through various internal and external assessments, DLT was selected as the underlying technology to curb the menace.

Tech Mahindra developed a plug-n-play solution, built on Hyperledger Fabric, to mitigate the problem. With the solution successfully deployed across three major telcos in India, Tech Mahindra has access to >50% market. This solution has potential to have a global impact. Tech Mahindra has already reached out to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. market and is exploring opportunities to socialize it with U.S.-based telcos to address the pain points of robo-calling and caller ID spoofing are key pain areas that can be addressed by our solution.

Sep 28

Love1

#HyperledgerFinTech: A sampling of production applications using Hyperledger technologies in the finance market

By Hyperledger Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha

The financial services market has long turned to technology to address a range of back-end challenges and enhance customer-facing services. Blockchain is increasingly becoming a go-to technology for advancing many different financial systems and solutions with different Hyperledger platforms serving as the core for an array of applications now in production.

Read on for just a sampling #HyperledgerFinTech solutions, built using a mix of Hyperledger technologies:

Bakong

Sponsored by the National Bank of Cambodia, the country’s central bank, Bakong is the first retail payments system in the world using blockchain technology. Built on Hyperledger Iroha, Bakong delivers value for customers, merchants and banks. Individuals can now transfer money and buy from merchants with a simple smartphone app. Merchants gain a fast, cashless, and secure payments system. And banks can do interbank transfers at much lower cost.

Bakong was developed by Soramitsu and, after a soft launch in 2019, is now expanding with 16 financial institutions using the system and more expected to join in the near future. The project was also designed to promote financial inclusion for the country’s large number of unbanked citizens. Any citizen of the country can open a Bakong account, even if they don’t have a traditional bank account. The more than 500 merchants that accept Bakong can be viewed in a map inside the app.

daura

Built atop the private Swiss Trust Chain run by Swisscom and Swiss Post and powered by Hyperledger Fabric, daura is a digital share platform for financing and investing in Swiss SMEs. With daura, the share register is easily digitized and capital increases are carried out quickly and inexpensively at the push of a button. Shares can be split into any number of small lots and the share register is always digitally maintained, complete and up-to-date. With daura, companies have also transitioned virtual Annual General Meetings as a response to COVID-19 with authorization and access are granted directly via the blockchain.

ioCash

ioBuilders is a blockchain technology company focused on building regulated fintech and enterprise solutions based on distributed ledger technology to help businesses succeed in their blockchain adoption. The company offers professional services, including technical, business and regulatory, and develops its own product line. ioBuilders has been one of the first adopters and advocates of Hyperledger Besu, providing essential feedback to improve its enterprise requirements capabilities.

ioCash, one of ioBuilder’s core products, is a fintech platform enabling the use of regulated fiat money on blockchain networks, making it programmable with smart contracts and able to interact with other blockchain use cases. ioCash’s platform operates under an electronic money licence, providing accounts (with or without IBAN) and complex payments functionalities through API and smart contracts connectivity. ioCash is also available as a technology license for financial institutions that hold banking or electronic money licences and are aiming to add the benefits of blockchain into their payment systems.

Memberpass

CULedger, a credit union service organization (CUSO) that began when a group of credit unions came together in 2016 as a direct response to the increasing threat of fraud, set out to bring a decentralized identity solution product for credit unions to market. The result was MemberPass, a permanent, portable digital identity credential for credit union members.

Built in partnership with Evernym and using Hyperledger Indy, Memberpass replaces vulnerable authentication processes such as common knowledge-based questions. Now credit unions are able to issue a digital credential to members, giving them a hassle-free way to control and prove their identity quickly and easily while protecting their personal information.

Verified.Me

Verified.Me offers a secure and convenient way to help Canadians verify their identities.

Verified.Me is a service offered by SecureKey Technologies Inc. The Verified.Me service was developed in cooperation with seven of Canada’s major financial institutions – BMO, CIBC, Desjardins, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD. The Verified.Me network continues to evolve adding new identity providers and service providers to make your life easier.

Verified.Me is built on top of the IBM Blockchain Platform which is based on Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric v1.2, and will be interoperable with Hyperledger Indy projects.

Users of the Verified.Me mobile app or web browser experience are able to get a free credit score with Equifax, register with Sun Life, verify their identity when registering for Dynacare Plus, an online and mobile service that lets users manage their health remotely, and more.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the financial service market with #HyperledgerFinTech this month on social channels. Or get involved with the Capital Markets or Trade Finance Special Interest Groups.

If you are interested in peer-to-peer transactions, mark your calendar for a webinar hosted by CoinDesk at 11:00 am ET on October 20th. A panel of experts on different Hyperledger platforms will be discussing “Governance, standards and interoperability: Getting past the roadblocks to peer-to-peer financial transactions.” Go here to find out more.

Aug 26

Love6

Hyperledger-Powered Education Solutions in Action

By Hyperledger Blog, Education, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha

Just before the age of COVID began in earnest, The New York Times ran a feature on “How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education.” The rise of remote learning and other pandemic-related changes and challenges have added to the need and opportunity for technology-driven advances.

The Hyperledger community is doing its part to help the higher education market adapt to an increasingly digital world. Below we look at five Hyperledger-powered solutions that are at work now in the education market. They are helping colleges and universities modernize how they tackle a number of core tasks, including issuing and verifying academic credits, automating on-campus payments and managing students’ identity and privacy.

Read on for more about these #HyperledgerEdu solutions, built using a mix of Hyperledger technologies:

Byacco, an on-campus payment system

Soramitsu has officially released Byacco, a payment system based on Hyperledger Iroha, for the University of Aizu, Japan. Byacco is a system that allows students and staff of the University of Aizu to use an application on their phones to pay for goods in the cafeteria and university store and to transfer funds within the campus. To make a transaction, all they need is to scan or to provide a QR code, depending on the operation. Byacco’s technology also has high standards for transfers: it follows the EMV® QR Code specification and has bank application level financial security protocols. The keys that are used to authorise transactions on the blockchain are stored only on the device, in a secure storage, so that no one except the owner can access the funds. Students of the university can join the development of the system, thus acquiring skills in creating financial systems based on Hyperledger technologies.

DoDream, a “Study Abroad Platform”

Dain Leaders is an education solution provider for universities in Korea. It serves more than 45 Korean universities by providing services for students’ career path development. As part of that effort, Dain Leader is introducing its “Study Abroad Platform,” called DoDream, to support the extended education ecosystem of the universities, accreditation and related agencies, and prospective employers. Based on Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service (which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric), the platform is an O2O service that provides foreign students with information on studying in Korea and a matching service with Korean universities.

Oracle Digital Certificates Solution

In the face of fast-changing demographic and economic drivers and student expectations, the current processes for issuing and verifying student certificates are too inefficient and time consuming. They can also lead to fraudulent or counterfeit certifications.

The Oracle Digital Certificates Solution, built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform (based on Hyperledger Fabric), provides a complete, end-to-end solution for educational institutions to issue verifiable tamper-proof and secure credential certification that improves the student experience after graduation and improves operational efficiency. The solution enables institutions to issue digital certificates along with transcripts and provide self-sovereign capability to the students who can share them securely with third parties through an access token.

This solution has been successfully deployed in production by customers like China Distance Education Holdings Limited (CDEL) and Taibah Valley University. CDEL uses Oracle Blockchain to share educational records and professional certifications across many educational institutions to help employers and recruiters verify the educational credentials claimed by individuals.

Many other institutions like national universities, employment agencies, government organizations, professional skills academies and universities that provide student grants/scholarships are using this solution as part of ongoing or planned pilots.

PwC Smart Credentials

Data is the new gravity in the world today and organisations are gravitating to and concentrating around trust as the ultimate currency in this data driven world. This trust is crucial for people to exchange information, especially in this digital age when trust is often violated.

With that premise, PwC developed Smart Credentials, a credential issuance, sharing, reviewing and revocation platform levegering the inherent core benefits of blockchain technology such as immutability, tamper-proof nature, transparency, authenticity and security.

Built using Hyperleder Indy and Hyperledger Aries to support the verification process, Smart Credentials has two key pillars: Authentication (you are who you say you are) and Authorization (genuine claim). Both are crucial ingredients of building trust in any ecosystem.

Smart Credentials recently won a “Bronze” medal for the Best Global Blockchain Innovation 2019 at the Reimagine Innovation awards (Backed by Wharton and QS) and is a finalist in the DataIQ 2020 awards “Best data product/ service” of the year category.

Verified.Me

As higher education moves deeper into online and remote learning for traditional and non-traditional students, colleges and universities are now offering a broader array of services that extend the campus experience to the digital realm. Beyond the advent of digital programming, educational institutions are also privy to sensitive personal student, faculty and alumni data from income and payment information to disciplinary records, healthcare and insurance information.

SecureKey Technologies’ Verified.Me service is one approach that supports education’s new digital and data privacy demands. This new digital identity verification service can help verify students, alumni and faculty in a timely and secure manner, strengthening educational institutions’ ability to expand their digital offerings with confidence – while also providing much-needed cost savings. Verified.Me is built using the IBM Blockchain Platform, which is based on Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications supporting the higher education marketing with #HyperledgerEdu this month on social channels. Also, Hyperledger has an Education Architecture Special Interest Group that is open to all.

Aug 17

Love0

National Bank of Cambodia’s New Digital Payment System: How Soramitsu Helped Modernize Retail Payments Using Hyperledger Iroha

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Iroha

In the Kingdom of Cambodia in Southeast Asia, three-quarters (78%) of its citizens have no bank account, yet more than half own a smartphone. And even though the native currency—the Khmer riel (KHR)—has been stable for 20 years, most people there use the American dollar. Ever since a major UN mission in the mid-1990s, the price of everything from a cup of coffee to a car has been given in U.S. dollars.

Addressing these challenges and more, the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) set out to see if a digital payment system could handle transactions faster and for lower cost than the existing system.

Could it promote wider use of the riel? And could that system run as a mobile app that any citizen with a smartphone could use to shop or transfer money to family or friends?

To find out, NBC partnered with blockchain developer experts Soramitsu on a retail payment system project that would modernize the country’s legacy retail payments with the help of the Hyperledger Iroha blockchain framework.

When most people picture a CBDC, they imagine an entirely new digital asset created out of “thin air.” The problem is, this new asset could distort a country’s monetary policy and affect its exchange rates. To be prudent, Cambodia’s central bank wanted to create a digital token backed by fiat currency stored safely in its vaults. The new payments platform would become a way to move around digitized cash, while preserving the creditworthiness and security of the central bank.

The resulting project, called Bakong, is the first retail payments system in the world using blockchain technology. Individuals can now transfer money and buy from merchants with a simple smartphone app. Merchants gain a fast, cashless, and secure payments system. And banks can do interbank transfers at much lower cost.

The pilot project went live in July 2019 and ran successfully with a network of 14 banks supporting more than 10,000 users, laying the groundwork for a large-scale rollout later this year.

Hyperledger teamed up with Soramitsu on a detailed case study covering the planning and implementation of Bakong, including key goals, milestones, security considerations and core technology requirements, as well as a preview of rollout plans and new features.

Read the full case study here.

Sep 19

Love0

2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: Integration of EVM from Hyperledger Burrow into Hyperledger Iroha

By Ivan Tyulyandin Blog, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

Hello, my name is Ivan Tyulyandin. I am a student at Saint Petersburg State University. I took part in the Hyperledger Internship Program, working with Andrei Lebedev (my mentor), Iurii Vinogradov and Eugene Kovalev from the Hyperledger Iroha team.

Hyperledger Iroha is a straightforward distributed ledger technology, inspired by the Japanese Kaizen principle — eliminate excessiveness. Users can create and manage their assets via Iroha commands. Iroha is written using C++, Protobuf, Boost and GTest. There are no smart contracts in Iroha.

Introduction

Hyperledger Burrow provides a modular blockchain client with the possibility to change different parts of the system. One modular piece is a permissioned smart contract engine, partially developed to the specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Burrow is developed using language Go.

The main purpose of this internship was to integrate EVM from Hyperledger Burrow into Hyperledger Iroha. Since Ethereum is de facto the most known platform for smart contract development, the integration will let Ethereum developers use Iroha as a new blockchain in distributed applications.

Project Components

The starting point was identifying the main components the project needed to address:

First of all, there should be a way to pass data (such as Ethereum bytecode, caller and callee) from Hyperledger Iroha to Hyperledger Burrow EVM. For this purpose, a new command to Iroha has to be added.
Another issue is to connect Golang and C++ code to bind Iroha and EVM.
The next step is to implement a special Burrow API to store EVM accounts data in Iroha.
The final requirement is new functionality testing.

Challenges

One of the challenges was to get deeper into the codebases of Hyperledger Burrow and Hyperledger Iroha. Existing integration examples of Burrow EVM to Fabric and Sawtooth gave me a nice understanding of what to do. From the Iroha side, Andrei Lebedev led me through the Iroha source code.

Results

With this information, I was able to develop a new command EngineCall. I made a wrapper using CGO (special go compiler mode that generates C library from Go source code) that Iroha uses to call Burrow EVM. Now an implementation of Burrow EVM API can send requests to Iroha for modification of its state via Protobuf messages. Every EVM account is stored in a technical account in Iroha. EVM account storage is emulated in the technical account details (which is key-value storage). All of this work was QA’d by writing and completing module and integration testing.

What comes next

More features can be added to this integration. The first one is web3 interface implementation, which will call remote EVM instance or use a local one. The next possible improvement is to add permissions to an Iroha account that represents an EVM account. Also, the current support of Burrow EVM in Iroha is not full, since there is no catching of EVM logs.

For more on this project, please read my full report.

Sep 19

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2019 Summer Mentee Project Update: Integration of Hyperledger Iroha into Hyperledger Explorer

By Ruslan Tushov Blog, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Mentorship Program

Hyperledger Iroha is a next-generation permissioned DLT initally contributed by Soramitsu. It provides asset and identity management, multi-signature and batch transactions. During the internship, I visited the Soramitsu office and communicated with Iroha development team.

Hyperledger Explorer is a tool that shows information from DLT networks. Initially, it was built to support for Hyperledger Fabric, with the expecting support for more DLTs would be added. Our goal was to add support for collecting and viewing Iroha transactions and Iroha-specific information to Hyperledger Explorer.

Accomplishments:

We implemented an integration of Hyperledger Iroha into Hyperledger Explorer. Now, Hyperledger Explorer shows information about Hyperledger Iroha peers, blocks, transactions, roles, domains, accounts.
We found and fixed some ambiguous statements in Hyperledger Iroha documentation.
We simplified code of our project by using open-source GraphQL framework developed by Facebook.

For a deeper dive into the work, read my full project report here.

I am very grateful for the support of my mentor, Ales Zivkovic, as well as Hyperledger for the opportunity to learn and contribute to open source Hyperledger projects.

May 06

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Hyperledger Launches Hyperledger Iroha 1.0

By Hyperledger Announcements, Hyperledger Iroha

Another production-ready framework released by the Linux Foundation’s open business blockchain consortium

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (May 6, 2019) – Hyperledger, a collaborative cross-industry effort created to advance blockchain technology, announced today the general availability of Hyperledger Iroha 1.0. Hosted by The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Iroha is the fourth active Hyperledger project to reach 1.0, following Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Indy. Iroha is a distributed ledger project that aims to provide a development environment where C++ and mobile application developers can contribute to Hyperledger.

New Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 features include:

YAC Consensus — a consensus protocol that ensures the safety of the ledger, even if some nodes are faulty or cannot be trusted. The protocol scales linearly in the peer network size.
Fully Operational Multisignature — an option for transactions when your application needs multiple signatures for transaction settlement.
Updated client libraries — support for writing applications on many different platforms from mobile to mainframe using many different programming languages such as Java (compatible with Android, Scala etc.), JS, Python, and iOS.
Windows support (experimental) — Hyperledger Iroha now natively runs on Windows, as well as in Linux and MacOS environments.

“It’s extremely gratifying to see another one of Hyperledger’s active projects hit the 1.0 milestone,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “This is a huge testament to the strong collaboration of our growing community. I look forward to seeing development efforts around Hyperledger Iroha continue to grow and more and more productions systems powered by the framework later this year.”

Hyperledger Iroha complements other Hyperledger projects by providing an alternative design solution for mobile-oriented use cases in finance and identity management. Hyperledger Iroha has a long-term vision to simplify the implementation of blockchain business applications by providing an easy-to-use API and a universal peer model. Hyperledger Iroha has a modular architecture making it additive to existing projects using other Hyperledger technologies and provides a robust library of reusable components to enhance existing applications.

Hyperledger Iroha contributors from around the world attend meet-ups and blockchain events, collaborate with universities, and answer constant questions in chats to help people learn about and use the framework. All are invited to participate in this open community.

Hyperledger aims to create distributed ledger technology that enables organizations to build and run robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions. The consortium now has more than 270 members with steady growth since its inception, spanning various industries including finance, healthcare, the Internet of Things, credit card services, supply chain and aeronautics, among several others.

You can find the Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 documentation here: https://iroha.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. Follow the “Getting Started” guide to create your first Hyperledger Iroha network in 10 minutes.

Community Quotes:

“The release of Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 is a significant milestone for this vibrant community and the enterprise blockchain space,” said Makoto Takemiya, CEO, Soramitsu. “As a core contributor to the project, we are very excited to see the Hyperledger Iroha team reach this milestone and continue to build upon the diverse DLT ecosystem developing under the Hyperledger greenhouse.”

“We are very excited about the release of Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 because it offers an out-of-box solution for implementation of blockchain networks to mobile devices,” said Yasir Azeem, Head AI and Blockchain from Ikioo. “With the combination of scalability and a permissioned Blockchain, Hyperledger has built something worth commending.”

“Global business is always terrific, and we had looked for the solution that fits our requirements in terms of a solution that is 100% open-sourced, oriented to specific needs of our task: account management, and KYC and supportive in terms of community,” said Alexander Yakovlev, NSD. “Iroha’s existing adoption experience in several countries and practical case with Cambodian central bank were additional benefits.”

Additional Resources:

Download Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 today
Learn more about Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 and what this release means with this blog post
Plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Chat, wiki or the mailing list
Follow Hyperledger on Twitter, like on Facebook, follow on LinkedIn or subscribe to the YouTube channel

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology by addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger as a Collaborative Project under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

Contact

Emily Fisher
Hyperledger/Linux Foundation
efisher@contractor.linuxfoundation.org

May 06

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Welcome Hyperledger Iroha 1.0: Flattening the DLT learning curve

By Makoto Takemiya, Hyperledger Iroha Contributor and Co-founder/CEO of Soramitsu Blog, Hyperledger Iroha

My first experience running a blockchain was when I first launched a Bitcoin node about six years ago. I got into Bitcoin out of curiosity and because the idea of sending value as digital data across the Internet was a very compelling idea.

Since those early days of experimentation, blockchain and DLT have emerged and found its place in enterprise — companies, individuals, consortiums want to get rid of non-transparent resource allocation, corruption, and fraud. Today, diamonds are registered on a blockchain, insurance companies know if you registered your MacBook at several places, and cross-border payments can operate more efficiently.

While blockchain technology has passed its longevity test, the software in general is still far from being integrator-friendly, developer-oriented, and straightforward; specifically when it comes to using distributed ledger technology instead of a database. This is where Hyperledger Iroha is different. With Hyperledger Iroha, it took me about 10 minutes to start building a blockchain. And now the Hyperledger Iroha team is releasing its first production-ready version, offering a faster, less complex path to DLT deployment. Welcome Hyperledger Iroha v1.0!

When it comes to solutions for business, it is critical that the technology is fit for the task and easy to integrate. Moreover, it must be reliable and safe so a business can trust it. Hyperledger Iroha provides safety with its decentralized consensus algorithm and reliability with a tested set of commands and queries. With them you can be sure that the code will do exactly what it is supposed to do — whether you want to add information to, or get information from, the ledger.

For this release the team prepared a special set of improvements:

New native client libraries deliver cross-application support for desktop/server (on Java, Python, C++) or mobile (iOS, Android (Java)) applications. You only need to get an idea of the client application and you are ready to go! Take a look at desktop and mobile application examples: on Java or JS: https://github.com/soramitsu/iroha-wallet-js
Novel, asynchronous consensus algorithm supporting one step agreement on votes with vote collection optimizations included (Yet Another Consensus; YAC). This means that even if a node is faulty, your decentralised ledger will still be up and running correctly. You can now focus on implementing your business application, leaving the question of whether you can trust partners’ nodes to Hyperledger Iroha.
Multi-signature transactions, or as we call them, MST, are now ready for production use. What does it mean for your business? It means that you can set a quorum, such that transactions from your company’s wallet will need several signatories instead of just one — just like in traditional banking, but quicker and more secure. This can also be used to model complex business processes in a secure and automatic way.
New backwards-compatibility allows you to integrate Hyperledger Iroha into your business and be sure that no breaking changes will affect it.

Hyperledger Iroha is already gaining strong traction with the community and enterprises:

Alexander Yakovlev from Moscow Exchange Group’s National Settlement Depository is using Hyperledger Iroha in D3 Ledger, and he said: “Global business is always terrific, and we looked for a solution that fits our requirements and is 100% open-sourced and oriented for the specific needs of our task. Features such as Iroha’s account management and supportive community, in addition to Soramitsu’s KYC application, were key factors in our decision to use Iroha for D3 Ledger. Iroha’s existing adoption in several countries and the practical use case with the Cambodian central bank were additional benefits.”

Hyperledger Iroha is already used in asset management, identity management, and payment systems. From simple asset transfers to secure information exchange about customers, Hyperledger Iroha can be used to empower a multitude of use cases, all without the need to program custom smart contracts.

Last year, I wrote a paper about Sora Identity, an implementation of a self-sovereign identity protocol using Hyperledger Iroha. Since then, we have worked on expanding this app and now we have a working product for KYC, targeted towards financial institutions. We are now expanding this to be at the core of the Sora decentralized autonomous economy, an exciting new type of economic system, geared towards empowering the creation of new goods and services.

Try it – simplicity and friendly support from the community will surely help you find your own way of improving your project with Hyperledger Iroha blockchain. You can find the Hyperledger Iroha 1.0 documentation here: https://iroha.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. Follow the “Getting Started” guide to create your first Iroha network in 10 minutes.

Hyperledger Iroha

Introduction

Project Components

Challenges﻿

What comes next

Challenges