Inaugural Hyperledger Global Forum Showcases Strong Community Momentum

Deployments, demos, project releases and member news underscore the fast growth and evolution of Hyperledger ecosystem

SAN FRANCISCO AND BASEL, SWITZERLAND – (December 12, 2018) – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today kicked off the first day of its Hyperledger Global Forum. The event has drawn more than 650 attendees from as far as Australia and Argentina for an extended conversation about the state of open source enterprise blockchain and vision for the Hyperledger community and technologies.

Headlined by keynotes like Leanne Kemp, CEO of Everledger, Hyperledger Global Forum addresses a wide range of business and technical topics. Key topics include use cases, production blockchain deployments and live demos of Hyperledger in a range of new systems. Hands-on workshops and technical talks will serve as fuel for the community development at the core of Hyperledger.

For Hyperledger, a project of The Linux Foundation that started less than three years ago, the event is a time to reflect on milestones. Hyperledger has surpassed 260 members, with more than a dozen new members including Citi and Alibaba Cloud announced today. In the last year, Hyperledger launched its 11th project, Ursa, and released development updates to the Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth frameworks. Additionally, Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance jointly announced membership in each other’s communities as a way to further bolster enterprise blockchain adoption.

“The scale and diversity of the community coming together for Hyperledger Global Forum is a testament to the momentum and evolution of enterprise blockchain,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “With a line-up of more than 260 member organizations, hundreds of code contributors, tens of thousands of community participants and 11 million lines of code, Hyperledger’s community and technologies are a driving force in the increasing pace of adoption of distributed ledger technology. Whether on the technical or business front, the discussions are now about the very real implications and impact of DLT deployments, and the next three days will only advance those conversations.”

Member News

As part of this global gathering of the Hyperledger and blockchain community, a host of members are announcing or showcasing new products, service offerings and milestones. Below is a recap of recent members’ news:

• AAIS (American Association of Insurance Services) – the only national not-for-profit insurance advisory organization, launched a pilot of openIDL (open Insurance Data Link) to transform insurance regulatory reporting on the IBM Blockchain Platform, which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric.
• Altoros – released a distributed application built on top of Hyperledger Fabric. The blockchain-based trading platform is a marketplace for peer-to-peer trades of any standardized financial instrument or commodity. It allows users to see the full history of bids, offers, and deals in a single interface. The solution acts as a common immutable and transparent source of “truth” while keeping sensitive information private through the custom functionality of Hyperledger Fabric. Tailor-made reporting feature provides a one-stop guide to pricing and volume trends during the whole trading day which helps save time and increase the efficiency of trading activities. Learn more: https://www.altoros.com/blockchain-finance-demo-otc.html

• B9Lab – recently announced a five-week Hyperledger Sawtooth online developer training course. Learn more: https://academy.b9lab.com/courses/B9lab/current-sawtooth-course

• Bitmark – announced the Bitmark Health App to help institutions and researchers crowdsource health data and track the chain-of-consent from individuals for its use. By pairing the Bitmark blockchain with Hyperledger Indy, the app enables the secure, verified digital identification of health companies and institutions—such as medical research, trial matching, university labs, big pharma—while still maintaining the privacy of, and chain-of-consent from, each patient. Learn more: https://bitmark.com/products/bitmark-health.

• Blockchain Technology Partners – recently launched Sextant™, its powerful blockchain management platform, on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace for Containers at AWS re:Invent. Sextant utilizes a carefully curated Hyperledger Sawtooth distribution – built, tested and maintained by BTP – to deliver one-click deployment of enterprise-grade Sawtooth networks. Sextant is cloud-first, and Kubernetes is the logical choice for production-grade orchestration. Under the covers Sextant automatically generates Kubernetes manifests so that Sawtooth can either be deployed on existing Kubernetes clusters or on brand new ones deployed by Sextant on AWS using Kubernetes Operations. BTP’s announcement can be found here.

• Blockdaemon – just announced Kinetic Ledger, which provides a tamper-evident seal cryptographically for users’ data. Using flexibly permissioned channels provided by Hyperledger, Blockdaemon’s new offering is in private beta testing using Fabric to provide any number of independent, single purpose ledgers. Blockdaemon became a member of the Hyperledger community in May and has been working closely with members to simplify the process of deploying nodes and creating scalable enterprise blockchain solutions. Learn more about Kinetic Ledger at kineticledger.com.

• Circulor – recently launched the world’s first blockchain mine to manufacturer traceability system for raw materials used in consumer electronics and electric vehicles. The Hyperledger Fabric-based system is already tracking tantalum, used into capacitors, from mines in Rwanda.  A large proportion of these raw materials, like tantalum and cobalt, are mined by hand in Africa and are associated with human rights abuses. Learn more: https://www.circulor.com/
• DLT Labs – DLT Labs has announced DL Gateway Fabric™ a development sandbox to set up and manage a blockchain network using Hyperledger Fabric. It can help accelerate the understanding and adoption of blockchain within an organization through a powerful load balanced REST API that interacts with the blockchain. It enables enterprises to build and test scalable applications without any installation or maintenance of blockchain infrastructure.
• Filament – launched Blocklet™ for Trusted Vehicle Applications (TVA), the industry’s first end-to-end automotive blockchain platform that allows vehicles to participate directly in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). The new solution supports Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth frameworks. It includes Filament’s Blocklet hardware technology as well as cellular connectivity, environmental sensing and access to vehicle diagnostics, making it possible for automotive, freight and transportation companies to create new, large-scale connected-vehicle services and smart contract applications on top of a trusted blockchain foundation. Learn more: https://filament.com/products/
• KoreConX – created its own globally-compliant Security Token Protocol, the KoreToken, which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric. The feature is now available at the all-in-one platform that has been the trademark of its services. The company also organized the first KoreSummit, an event dedicated to educating the business industry about Blockchain and Security Tokens.
• KrypC – developed an end-to-end production grade application in the area of BFSI, the first trade finance e-marketplace for banks. It is powered by Hyperledger Fabric and proprietary components of KrypC and enables all the banks, FIs, and treasuries to exchange information and assets with others, selectively, securely and efficiently. TradeAssets is in production with more than 15+ banks onboard. Some of the other success stories are in the area of microfinance and travel Insurance, also tokenizing the bill of lading and secured movement of cargo tokens for Maersk, which will set a new standard in an interlocking e2e supply chain.
• Monax – announced that the Monax Platform is now in private beta. The Monax Platform is powered by Hyperledger Burrow and is a contract lifecycle management tool that allows consumers to easily procure lawyer-tested agreements and stay in full control of their business contracting. Harnessing a unique combination of active agreements, blockchain technology and a business process modelling engine, the platform is designed to move business legal obligations into the networked world. Learn more: www.monax.io
• Oracle – To support customer production launches on its Blockchain Cloud Service (powered by Hyperledger Fabric), Oracle recently upgraded its platform to add:
  • A rich set of REST APIs for events subscription and integration
  • Support for SQL-based rich data queries in smart contracts
  • The first-ever Analytics/BI integration for transaction history
  • Identity federation capabilities
  • Support for third-party certificates for blockchain client organizations

In customer trials, Oracle has demonstrated a hybrid blockchain joining OBCS and Hyperledger Fabric nodes outside of Oracle Cloud. The company also announced Oracle Blockchain Application Cloud, a new suite of business-ready SaaS applications that enhance traceability and transparency throughout the supply chain.

• SecureKey – Will launch its innovative and in-demand Verified.Me network to Canadian consumers in early 2019. Verified.Me is a blockchain-based digital identity network built upon Hyperledger Fabric 1.2, enabling consumers to stay in control of their information by choosing when to share information and with whom, reducing unnecessary oversharing of personal information. Learn more: https://verified.me/
• Soramitsu and NSD (Moscow Exchange Group) – Jointly launched a new product named D3Ledger, a global distributed digital depository platform based on Hyperledger Iroha. Its main objective is to provide safekeeping of digital assets for large institutional investors in collaboration with regulating partners. A pilot deal was made earlier this year when AddCapital Investment Fund moved an undisclosed amount of Ethereum inside D3ledger’s custody. D3ledger peer network consisted of three nodes for this pilot transaction: KDD (Slovenian CSD), National Settlement Depository and Lykke. A new BFT consensus – YAC – will allow D3ledger to operate at 2000tps by Q1 2019.
• Sovrin Foundation – announced Sovrin Network 1.6, a decentralized global public network enabling self-sovereign identity on the internet and a successful implementation of Hyperledger Indy. The Sovrin Network is designed to bring the trust, personal control and ease-of-use of analog IDs (like driver’s licenses and employee ID cards) to the internet. This 1.6 update will support the growing global use of the Sovrin Network and the adoption of self-sovereign identity. Learn more: https://sovrin.org/.
• Swisscom – announced a 100% Swiss infrastructure for blockchain applications along with Swiss Post. The two companies are building a simple, secure and sustainable infrastructure for blockchain applications in Switzerland and will present it to the public for the first time at Hyperledger Global Forum. They will also make the infrastructure, which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric, available to other companies for their applications. The market launch for the first pilot applications is planned for the second quarter of 2019.

To learn more about Hyperledger and enterprise blockchain technologies, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.