Few technology trends have as much momentum as blockchain — which is now impacting industries from banking to healthcare. The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project is helping drive this momentum as well as providing leadership around this complex technology, and many people are interested in getting involved. In fact, Hyperledger nearly doubled its membership in 2017 and recently added Deutsche Bank as a new member.
A recent webinar, Get Involved: How to Get Started with Hyperledger Projects, focuses particularly on making Hyperledger projects more approachable. The free webinar is now available online and is hosted by David Boswell, Director of Ecosystem at Hyperledger and Tracy Kuhrt, Community Architect.
Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, and Iroha
Hyperledger currently consists of 10 open source projects, seven that are in incubation and three that have graduated to active status. “The three active projects are Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and Hyperledger Iroha,” said Boswell.
Fabric is a platform for distributed ledger solutions, underpinned by a modular architecture. “One of the major features that Hyperledger Fabric has is a concept called channels. Channels are a private sub-network of communication between two or more specific network members for the purpose of conducting private and confidential transactions.”
According to the website, Hyperledger Iroha is designed to be easy to incorporate into infrastructural projects requiring distributed ledger technology. It features simple construction, with emphasis on mobile application development.
Hyperledger Sawtooth is a modular platform for building, deploying, and running distributed ledgers, and you can find out more about it in this post. One of the main attractions Sawtooth offers is “dynamic consensus.”
“This allows you to change the consensus mechanism that’s being used on the fly via a transaction, and this transaction, like other transactions, gets stored on the blockchain,” said Boswell. “With Hyperledger Sawtooth, there are ways to explicitly let the network know that you are making changes to the same piece of information across multiple transactions. By being able to provide this explicit knowledge, users are able to update the same piece of information within the same block.”
Sawtooth can also facilitate smart contracts. “You can write your smart contract in a number of different languages, including C++ JavaScript, Go, Java, and Python,” said Boswell. Demonstrations and resources for Sawtooth are available here:
- Code: https://github.com/hyperledger/sawtooth-core
- Demos: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/examples/
- Documentation: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/
How to contribute to Hyperledger projects
In the webinar, Kuhrt and Boswell explain how you can contribute to Hyperledger projects. “All of our working groups are open to anyone that wants to participate, including the training and education working group,” said Kuhrt. “This particular working group meets on a biweekly basis and is currently working to determine where it can have the greatest impact. I think this is really a great place to get in at the start of something happening.”
What are the first steps if you want to make actual project contributions? “The first step is to explore the contributing guide for a project,” said Kuhrt. “All open source projects have a document at the root of their source directory called contributing, and these guides are really to help you find information about how you’d file a bug, what kind of coding standards are followed by the project, where to find the code, where to look for issues that you might start working with, and requirements for pull requests.”
Now is a great time to learn about Hyperledger and blockchain technology, and you can find out more in the next webinar coming up May 31:
Blockchain and the enterprise. But what about security?
Date: Thursday, May 31, 2018
Time: 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time
This talk will leave you with understanding how Blockchain does, and does not, change the security requirements for your enterprise. Sign up now!
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Hyperledger Global Forum will offer the unique opportunity for more than 1,200 users and contributors of Hyperledger projects from across the globe to meet, align, plan, and hack together in-person. Share your expertise and speak at Hyperledger Global Forum! We are accepting proposals through Sunday, July 1, 2018. Submit Now >>
This article originally appeared on The Linux Foundation
