Hyperledger and New Applications of Decentralized Technologies

Posted by Michael Kelley on May 30th, 2018

Thousands of developers and companies are working to provide access to simplified blockchain technology processes as we speak. Part of the way blockchain is revolutionizing the way we communicate and do business is decentralization. Decentralization in blockchain is a wide concept, and it can include any network of transactions based on trust where there is no central authority. Decentralization comes with its risks, as not every participant in a network is equally known and trusted to be given full access to the same resources. Consequently, the attractive idea behind total decentralization of all transactions between every individual or company in the world is almost impossible or at least far-fetched.

However, the distributed ledgers at the core of blockchain technology transform the laden, slow and inefficient business transactions with promising acceleration. Hyperledger adjusted the idea for 100% public and open-access to everything that is happening between businesses to permissioned ledgers for trusted participants. To understand Hyperledger, perhaps it’s best to associate it with one of its characteristics - Open Governance. Open Governance is much more than open-source code. It is a meritocracy concept that encompasses the technical skills and the decisions behind successfully developed projects from community elected professionals.

In a way, Hyperledger is similar to blockchains; but, at the same time it’s important to make a difference that the open platform is much more: an incubator for blockchain real-time application solutions, providing distributed ledgers, smart contract engines, client libraries, and graphic interfaces to businesses who want to run confidential and secure work in a faster way.

Hyperledger’s Place Among Current Blockchain Platforms

Blockchain is a thriving technology and Hyperledger is not the only platform to support it. Apart from the Linux Foundation, other significant projects include Ethereum, R3 Corda, Ripple and Stellar.

Most blockchain users know that solidity development is one of the key tools they will need to apply when building dApps on Ethereum. Although you wouldn’t want to ditch solidity development as a tool for building smart contracts, Hyperledger provides extra help to gap a number of the difficulties as opposed to start building blockchains from scratch. If you decide to capitalize on Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer instead of focusing on solidity development, you would be expected to use the set architecture behind them, built jointly by expert computer scientists and cryptographers. So, Hyperledger is a partially completed blockchain application that will support many solidity developers who have tested the Ethereum waters come to grips with permissioned smart contracts. You can take start building applicable smart contracts by coding with Java and Go to develop Chaincodes.

Typical Industries Interested in Hyperledger Application

When a contract is smart, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is legal. Translating the vocabulary of smart contracts is not easy. Hyperledger solves the legal aspects of smart contracts, The Accord Project, for example, uses blockchain technology from several platforms (a chance to try your solidity development skills, as well as your knowledge of Chaincode) to enable development of an open-source technology for techno-legal standards. The software named Cicero helps legal professionals and business managers turn business legal contracts into smart contracts by connecting them to a variety of blockchain tools.

Healthcare pros are among the most avid members of Hyperledger. For example, Change Healthcare applied Hyperledger Fabric to implement a new customer payment management system, where customers track analytics and explore the revenue cycle without the need for complex coding skills or specially-created interfaces.

Making complex processes simple was the goal of Cloudsoft, too. Cloudsoft used the basics of Hyperledger Fabric to develop AMP automation that can be applied to the entire life cycle of a modern cloud application. This makes it easy for developers to run and test chain-codes via Hyperledger Fabric software blueprint.

The first meetup discussion for the possible use of Google Home in terms of creating actions for Google Assistant with the help of Hyperledger has recently taken place in NYC. With the VUI (Voice User Interface), developers can carry on conversations and perform actions. The idea is to discuss the potential of the technology for mobile blockchains.

Hyperledger Composer and Big Industries
While this is still in the realm of news, there are several running projects for developing business networks on Hyperledger Composer, where businesses choose optimized supply paths and use the advantages of joining a blockchain network over going solo. A lot of the work in this domain is undertaken by IBM.

As one of the major players in the Hyperledger, IBM is ready to offer companies ready-made solutions to companies via the Hyperledger Fabric and the Hyperledger Composer. Having in mind that these are permission-based peer-to-peer networks, they enable a company to interact with trusted participants in a network on an “invitation-only” principle. Not only can businesses set permissions or send invitations, but they can also implement network channels as added transaction layers. This is of great importance for companies who like to have some scalable control over the privacy they practice in the network. Unlike Ethereum blockchains created with solidity development and mining resources, the Hyperledger transaction flow is more scalable and economic in terms of resources.

Notable Up-and-Running Hyperledger Projects
IBM’s famous projects using the Hyperledger blockchain technology include LOCI, the intellectual property inventory where investors can use tokens named LOCIcoins to get the revenue from their patented work worldwide; ConnectJob, an open job hunt market of certified job candidates and customers; Odem, an informal academic database of students based on a smart contract payment system; and the fundraisers AidCoin, which use blockchains principles of trust to assure legitimate donation expenditure. The Singaporean company Invictus has applied a new Hyperledger financial solution to its e-procurement platform with the intention to offer secure financing in the early stages of the procurement process.

Trusted and immutable distributed ledgers have already captured the interest of large food supply chains, such as Walmart and Nestle. For example, blockchain application can improve the supply chain traceability, tracking down the source of contamination in a large network of suppliers that deliver the ingredients for a particular product to the manufacturer.

With more than 120,000 new apps each month in Bluemix cloud service, IBM is leading the way in blockchain technology and is definitely the one to have a look into.

In the end, it’s interesting to think of blockchain in terms of digital identification. Someone has thought that the traceability of blockchain technology can solve the problem of fake news: Hyperledger frameworks can be used to develop Trusted News Networks (TNNs).

Although Hyperledger seems to be the premier tool for enterprise blockchain solutions at the moment, you will still need your solidity development tools: the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is constantly increasing its membership and gaining momentum. On open markets, where businesses hope to thrive in blockchain greenhouse incubators, that can only be a good thing.