open source

Cointelegraph Consulting: Research outlines how DeFi can merge with traditional finance

February 23, 2021 by Blockchain Consultants

Whilst public adoption of crypto assets is increasing, the global regulations continue to progress and recognise decentralized technologies as a suitable infrastructure for the dematerialisation of securities. In Luxembourg, the country that is second in the world in terms of assets under management, the country’s regulator adopted a bill that explicitly recognised the possibility of using distributed ledger technology for the dematerialisation of securities.

The regulation is moving quickly elsewhere across Europe: Tokenized securities now fall under the same rules and regulations as traditional financial instruments in many other European countries including France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the UK.

Read the ebook to discover how you can be part of this emerging digital asset industry. Download the full report here.

What next for the industry? Due to the increase in public adoption and the favourable regulatory environment, demand from the financial industry to access digital networks is on the rise. So far, banks have digitized the retail industry but not much has evolved in capital markets.

The digitization of this industry is now possible through the blockchain, an infrastructure now widely recognized by the largest governments globally for financial instruments. Funds and asset managers can now upgrade their distribution channels by launching Digital Asset Marketplace (DAM) and connecting to others via decentralized networks.

DAMs will help their customers discover new opportunities, manage their investments and even open secondary market possibilities. In this ebook, industry participants explain how capital market players can benefit from blockchain by launching a DAM and maximizing the monetization of their investor base.

Financial institutions are beginning to publicly embrace and adopt the technology. So far they have started, as expected, with crypto-assets. Once they begin to trust the technology and it becomes embedded within their portfolios, it will mean one thing: curiosity will peak and these institutions will realise the operational benefits of decentralized technology.

Driven by increased confidence in the technology, and pressured by DeFi replacing many traditional banking functions, institutions will begin to learn that the technology can solve long-standing and deeply entrenched industry problems, particularly in the opaque and highly illiquid private markets.

Digital Asset Marketplaces, i.e. primary and secondary venues where investors meet, will be the driver for this according to the study. However, open source standards like the Token for Regulated EXchanges (T-REX), are required to enforce compliance onchain in a heavily regulated world.

Cointelegraph Consulting: Research outlines how DeFi can merge with traditional finance

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New Members and Certified Service Providers Joined Hyperledger for Annual Member Summit

September 30, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

Curious to know who all new members and Certified Service Providers joined the Hyperledger annual Member Summit? What was the agenda of such a Member Summit? This article will answer all your questions.

Introduction to Hyperledger
Hyperledger Umbrella
What is the Hyperledger Member Summit?
New Members Who Became Part of Annual Member Summit
Concluding Lines

Introduction to Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open-source group whose mission is to increase business Blockchains’ adoption through global open source collaboration. It partners with more than 250 member companies, including the global leaders in finance, banking, supply chains, IoT, manufacturing, etc. Launched in 2015 by the Linux Foundation, it aims to develop enterprise-grade and distributed ledger applications to support cross-industry blockchain technologies. Due to its advancements, it has multiple projects under it; however, four are widely used. Even though Hyperledger has advanced a lot already, it is still evolving and maturing enough to draw the attention of businesses interested in creating more affordable and easier blockchain solutions.

Want to gain in-depth knowledge of Hyperledger Technology and become a Certified Hyperledger Expert? Sign up for Blockchain Council.

Hyperledger Umbrella

Let’s briefly define all the projects under the Hyperledger community

Hyperledger Fabric provides a platform for the development of different products, solutions, and applications based on Blockchain for business use.
Hyperledger Burrow is a permissioned Ethereum smart-contract blockchain node that handles multiple transactions and executes smart contract code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Hyperledger Sawtooth is an enterprise-level, permissioned, scalable blockchain platform that uses Proof of Elapsed Time(PoET) consensus mechanism.
Hyperledger Besu is an Ethereum client designed to be enterprise-friendly for public and private permissioned networks.
Hyperledger Indy is a distributed ledger that supports several tools and libraries for digital identities rooted in blockchains.
Hyperledger Aroha works on Linux and Mac OS, with several mobile and desktop libraries and can be used for interbank settlement, healthcare, logistics, etc.

What is the Hyperledger Member Summit?

The Hyperledger Member Summit is held each year, bringing together the Hyperledger group to learn about the latest innovations, share best practices and work together to accelerate rapid progress across the industry. This year it was scheduled on September 10-11, 2020. However, this time the Hyperledger community announced that Member Summit took place in a virtual format to meet wider audiences.

New Members Who Became Part of Annual Member Summit

As the Hyperledger group welcomes the virtual Member Summit’s new participants and certified service providers, it showcases eight new members and seven firms that have been Hyperledger Certified Service Providers (HCSPs).

Eight new organizations have joined for the annual member summit, including Chainstack, SIMBA

Chain, SIX Digital Exchange, and Visa, to engage with Hyperledger ‘s global group.

To become a Hyperledger Certified Service Provider (HCSP), the training criteria were successfully completed by various companies, including Creativehill, DeepDive Technology Group, NEC, SAP, SwissCom, Tech Mahindra, and Tencent.

Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger, believes that Member Summit is crucial for grounding points for our community. In his words,

“The pace of adoption for enterprise blockchain is accelerating, and our members are a driving force for critical new technologies and solutions. Our latest members will be important new voices as we set agendas and roadmaps that will keep us pushing this market forward in the year ahead.”

Chainstack Chainstack aims to make launching and scaling of decentralized networks and applications easy. On any cloud, it offers enterprise-grade, managed blockchain services, and aims to offer scalability, flexibility, and transparency.

Creativehill aims at building fintech solutions to find new opportunities in digital finance systems. It aims at building permissioned blockchain systems and offers consultation to those fields where Blockchain can be applied.

DeepDive Technology Group aims at building intuitive and complex blockchain solutions and believes that the Hyperledger community plays a leading role in the advancement of enterprise blockchain.

EMURGO is a multinational blockchain technology company providing solutions for developers, startups, enterprises, and governments. It aims at developing Blockchain and smart contracts solutions for organizations of all sizes.

SIMBA Chain is a cloud-based, smart-contract-as-a-service network that enables users to deploy globally accessible decentralized apps (dApps). Such apps allow safe, direct links between users and suppliers, removing third-party intermediaries.

Apart from these, SIX Digital Exchange and Valid Network were also a part of the Member Summit 2020.

The Verdict

Hyperledger provides technological and business governance-supported community-driven infrastructure that aims at building enterprise-grade, open-source, distributed ledger systems, and codebases to facilitate business transactions. The Hyperledger community trains the public about the market opportunity that technology holds. Due to its flexibility, scalability, and security, Hyperledger certifications have gained a lot of public attention. If you want to become a Certified Hyperledger Expert, you can sign up to Blockchain Council!

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online Blockchain Certifications, check out Blockchain Council.

New Members and Certified Service Providers Joined Hyperledger for Annual Member Summit

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Tangle EE project joins Eclipse Foundation to bring distributed ledger apps to enterprise

February 11, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

As the number of IoT devices proliferate, and machines conduct transactions with machines without humans involved, it becomes increasingly necessary to have a permissionless system that facilitates this kind of communication in a secure way.

Enter the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based open-source distributed ledger technology (DLT) project, which has hooked up with the Eclipse Foundation to bring IOTA DLT to the enterprise via the Tangle EE project. For starters, this involves forming a working group.

The distributed ledger idea first emerged as a way to distribute digital currency on the blockchain. Since then, there have been multiple ideas, both open source and commercial, to bring this concept to the enterprise to provide a secure, immutable and frictionless way to share data.

One such open-source project is IOTA, which saw an issue with DLT as it was being implemented by other entities. “IOTA is the first distributed ledger technology that went beyond blockchain with a completely new architecture that resolves the bottleneck problems of blockchain that has prevented real-world adoption,” Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA Foundation, told TechCrunch.

The broad vision is to provide a way for machines and devices to communicate securely. “We provide a protocol layer that enables both humans and machines to bulk transact value without fees, as well as ensure data integrity, which is, of course, increasingly important in the age of Internet of Things, where hundreds of billions of devices are being connected over the next decades,” Schiener said.

Tangle EE is the part of the project aimed at enterprise users — EE stands for Enterprise Edition — that can take this technology and enable larger organizations to build applications on top of the project. For starters the foundation is working with the Eclipse Foundation to bring corporate entities on board who can help better define the requirements of the large business user.

Dell Technologies and STMicroelectronics are the first major companies joining the project, but the hope is that through discussion and dialogue, Tangle EE will begin to gain traction. “The main reason why we created Tangle EE was because of the discussions that we’ve had with corporations. They really understood that we need to have a working group around IOTA to discuss the application layer, to discuss what kind of solutions we can develop broadly across industries, but also really start having more serious discussions about the protocol,” Schiener said.

Much like the Linux Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation will provide a governance framework for the project. “The Eclipse Foundation will provide a vendor-neutral governance framework for open collaboration, with IOTA’s scalable, feeless and permissionless DLT as a base,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, explained in a statement.

If it gains traction, more companies will join in the coming months and years, and begin building out Tangle EE, while developing applications based on the protocol.

Hyperledger Fabric, the open-source distributed ledger, reaches release 2.0

Hyperledger Fabric, the open-source distributed ledger, reaches release 2.0

January 31, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

The open-source Hyperledger Foundation announced the release of Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 today, the first such project to reach a 2.0 release.

It’s a notable milestone. The blockchain as a business tool has certainly had a rocky road over the last few years, but there is still plenty to like about smart contracts that have automated compliance checks built-in. Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 has lots of new features with that in mind.

The biggest updates involve forcing agreement among the parties before any new data can be added to the ledger, known as decentralized governance of the smart contracts. In practice, it means that the system will prevent any entity from writing to the ledger until there is consensus among the parties involved in the transaction, a basic blockchain tenet.

This is a requirement because the beauty and the curse of the distributed ledger is that it is an immutable record. Once you have written something in the ledger, it becomes very difficult to change it without the agreement of all those involved in the contract. You want to make sure you get it right before you commit something to the ledger.

Along those same lines, developers can build in automated checks along the way. As they say, this ensures the parties can “validate additional information before endorsing a transaction proposal.”

Brian Behlendorf, executive director at Hyperledger and a big advocate of open-source distributed ledger technology, says this is a big milestone for the project and the organization as it looks to help organizations adopt distributed ledger technology.

“Fabric 2.0 is a new generation framework developed by and for the enterprises that are building distributed ledger capabilities into the core of their businesses. This new release reflects both the development and deployment experience of the Fabric community and confirms the arrival of the production era for enterprise blockchain,” Behlendorf said in a statement.

That remains to be seen. The rise of blockchain in business has moved at a slow pace, but this release shows that the open-source community is still committed to building enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology. Today’s announcement is another step in that direction.

Kadena fulfills hybrid blockchain vision with launch of public chain

January 20, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

For the last few years, blockchain startup Kadena has been working on a vision of bringing blockchain to the enterprise. Today it announced the final piece of that vision with the launch of the Kadena public blockchain.

In earlier releases, the company offered the ability to build private blockchains on AWS or Azure. Company co-founder and CEO Will Martino says the public network brings together for the first time public and private chains in a hybrid vision.

“The big exciting thing is that the public chain is out, smart contracts are about to turn on, and that allows us to then go and hit the market with what we’re calling these hybrid applications. These are applications that run both on a private blockchain, but have public smart contracts that allow people on the public side to interact with the private chain,” Martino explained.

The smart contracts are a set of rules that must be met and validated for the private and public chains to interact. Only valid actors and actions as defined in the smart contract and will be allowed to move between the two chains.

Overcoming scaling issues

One of the major challenges with building a chain like this has been scaling it to meet the needs of enterprise users. Martino says that his company has solved this problem and can scale from the 10 chains today to 10,000 or more in the future as the company grows. He further claims that his company is the only one with a tractable roadmap capable of achieving this.

Martino says this could help push companies who have been dabbling in blockchain technology in the last couple of years to take a bigger leap. “This is a watershed moment for enterprises. Up until now, they’ve never had a platform that they could go and use on a public blockchain platform and know that it’s going to have the throughput they need if the product they deployed on that blockchain has legs and starts to take off.” Martino says this blockchain has that.

Kadena public blockchain in action

Kadena has also developed an open-source smart contract language called Pact that Martino says allows a lawyer with Excel-level programming understanding to write these contracts and place them on the chain.

“There are a lot of lawyers who are good with Excel, so you can actually hand the smart contracts to a lawyer and have them review them for compliance. And that’s a crazy idea, but we think it’s fundamental because when you’re representing core business workflows that are sensitive, you need to be absolutely certain they are compliant.”

Show me the money

The company is making all of the basic pieces available for free. That includes the private chain development tools on AWS and Azure, the public chain released today, along with the Pact smart contract language.

Martino says there are a couple of ways for the business to make money. For starters, it’s building partnerships where it helps companies in various sectors, from financial services to insurance and healthcare, build viable hybrid applications on the Kadena blockchain. When they make money, so will Kadena.

Secondly, they control a bushel of tokens on their public network, which have value, and if the vision comes to fruition, will have much more over time. They will be able to sell some of these tokens on the public market and make money. Right now he says the tokens have a value of between 20 cents and a dollar, but he expects that to increase as the network becomes more viable.

The blockchain has lost some of its luster as it has moved through the enterprise hype cycle in recent years, but if Kadena can succeed in building a fully decentralized, scalable blockchain, it could help push the technology deeper into the enterprise.

The blockchain begins finding its way in the enterprise

Were talking Kubernetes at TC Sessions: Enterprise with Googles Aparna Sinha and VMwares Craig McLuckie

June 30, 2019 by Blockchain Consultants

Over the past five years, Kubernetes has grown from a project inside of Google to an open source powerhouse with an ecosystem of products and services, attracting billions of dollars in venture investment. In fact, we’ve already seen some successful exits, including one from one of our panelists.

On September 5th at TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’re going to be discussing the rise of Kubernetes with two industry veterans. For starters we have Aparna Sinha, director of product management for Kubernetes and the newly announced Anthos product. Sinha was in charge of several early Kubernetes releases and has worked on the Kubernetes team at Google since 2016. Prior to joining Google, she had 15 years experience in enterprise software settings.

Craig McLuckie will also be joining the conversation. He’s one of the original developers of Kubernetes at Google. He went on to found his own Kubernetes startup, Heptio, with Joe Beda, another Google Kubernetes alum. They sold the company to VMware last year for $505 million after raising $33.5 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The two bring a vast reservoir of knowledge and will be discussing the history of Kubernetes, why Google decided to open source it and how it came to grow so quickly. Two other Kubernetes luminaries will be joining them. We’ll have more about them in another post soon.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine. Instead of developing large monolithic applications that sit on virtual machines, containers run a small part of the application. As the components get smaller, it requires an orchestration layer to deliver the containers when needed and make them go away when they are not longer required. Kubernetes acts as the orchestra leader.

As Kubernetes, containerization and the cloud-native ethos it encompasses has grown, it has helped drive the enterprise shift to the cloud in general. If you can write your code once, and use it in the cloud or on prem, it means you don’t have to manage applications using different tool sets and that has had broad appeal for enterprises making the shift to the cloud.

TC Sessions: Enterprise (September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center) will take on the big challenges and promise facing enterprise companies today. TechCrunch’s editors will bring to the stage founders and leaders from established and emerging companies to address rising questions, like the promised revolution from machine learning and AI, intelligent marketing automation and the inevitability of the cloud, as well as the outer reaches of technology, like quantum computing and blockchain.

Tickets are now available for purchase on our website at the early-bird rate of $395; student tickets are just $75.

Student tickets are just $75 – grab them here.

We have a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.

For each ticket purchased for TC Sessions: Enterprise, you will also be registered for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.