Hyperledger Project — Blockchain Technologies Transforming the Business World

Blockchains bring the opportunity to save time, money, and reduce risks for a wide range of industries.

This unlocks possibilities, where new processes can be brought into being. Specifically, Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology allows innovators from various industries — healthcare, banking, finance, IoT, manufacturing, supply chain — to build customized blockchains combining cross-industry knowledge.

This transformation is powered by Hyperledger, hosted by The Linux Foundation, and can answer specific needs for growing business results with the help of modular architecture that maximizes the resilience, flexibility, and confidentiality of blockchain solutions.

Why Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Technology Matters for Business

CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty said, “What the internet did for communications, I think blockchain will do for trusted transactions.”

A concern of making transactions really cheap to record and easy to verify is extremely true for worldwide companies.

Fabric is not a “one-size-fits-all’’ solution, but an open-source developer-focused community to benefit an ecosystem of Hyperledger-based solution providers and users, focused on blockchain-related use cases that will work across a variety of industries and sectors. But wait: why should you care?

“There will be many public chains and millions of private chains, potentially each with a different consensus mechanism, preferred smart contract language, and other characteristics,” said Brian Behlendorf, IBM Executive Director. “The more common code underlying these chains, the better for everyone.”

One of the project goals is to create a family of enterprise-grade, open-source blockchain frameworks, platforms and libraries, upon which anyone can build and run their own apps to meet real business needs.

What you have to remember behind these sentences, is that Hyperledger will help you to secure and customize supply logistics, distribution and payment verifications between entities. 

Hyperledger Fabric Technical Benefits

Let’s have a closer look at the so-called differentiating design features, presented in the Hyperledger’s white paper, and how you can take advantage.

 

• Privacy and Confidentiality. All these differentiating design features allow Fabric to be one of the better performing platforms today, enabling the privacy and confidentiality of both in terms of transaction processing and transaction confirmation latency.
• Modularity. It’s a highly modular and configurable architecture, enabling innovation, versatility, and optimization for a broad range of industry use cases including insurance, human resources, banking, finance, healthcare, supply chain, and even digital music delivery.
• Permissioned Blockchain. If you are building a blockchain for a business, you are likely building a permissioned one. This means the participants of the platform are known to each other. Permissioned network is about trust, no anonymous or pseudonymous users.
• Pluggable Consensus. Such protocols support enables the platform to be more effectively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models.
• Smart Contracts. A distributed ledger platform to support smart contracts authored in general-purpose programming languages such as Java, Go and Node.js, rather than constrained domain-specific languages (DSL). It’s easy to get started for most enterprises. Your team can program smart contracts in the languages it works in today without additional learning of custom languages.
• Performance and Scalability. Fabric V1 delivers a truly modular scalable and secure foundation for industrial blockchain solutions. The most notable changes that peers now decoupled into two separate runtimes with 3 distinct roles: endorser, committer, and consenter.

With this in mind, whether you are an entrepreneur, developer, director, provider or an investor, be careful of which blockchain could answer your needs.

You might think Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies blockchain are necessarily the keys to unlock your industrial issues encountered in the business world, but it can be wrong. Depending on what you’re aiming to achieve, consider consulting with skilled and professional software engineer team.

NIX expertise — Child Medical Record

Hyperledger framework drives the ability to isolate multiple organizations from each other through channels thus organizations without access to the channel cannot see the information in it. Hyperledger also provides a toolkit for creating a network, distributing rights between different organizations in it.

The NIX team had a challenging task to create and confidentially maintain health info about a patient when there are several independent participants in the process. Here is our network structure:

 

How it works

A flow, where several key participants are there — Hospital (Pediatrician) – Parents – Elementary School — contains the following 5 steps:

1. Parents sign an agreement with the hospital, where their child is examined.
2. A pediatrician gains access to their child’s medical records and the ability to update info on a child’s health state.
3. Parents apply for a place in an elementary school for a child.
4. If a child is appealed, an elementary school sends a request to the pediatrician for a report on a child’s health state.
5. A doctor creates a report, then parents have to give permission to particular elementary school/s to check the report.

 

To restrict access to confidential info about children’s medical records, a different channel was created, accessible only to parents and the hospital. Thus, the elementary school will be not able to store any child’s medical records info on its node. Here is a parent’s advantage — confidential transactions only.

Also, our team created one more channel for reports on a child’s health state with access to all peers.

Dive into technical details

• A two-party channel for both a hospital and parents. A pediatrician and parents sign an agreement with each other. This information is stored in the world state of the channel. The pediatrician updates the information in the medical records if required.
• A channel for a health report. This channel is for the applying process to an elementary school. First, the report goes to the blockchain when a doctor made it. The report has a “ready” status and contains information from the medical record. An elementary school will be able to receive the report only after the status will be changed to “approved” by a parent.
• Identity determination. Hyperledger Fabric uses an X509 certificate that allows you to record any information about the owner. We record there the user’s UID.
• Confidentiality and Security. Storage of medical cards is carried out in the world state of the channel of parents and the hospital. We chose such storage because, in case of storing information in private storage, we will not be able to see information about changes in medical records in the ledger.

To get medical record info from another channel, one needs to make several requests to the network: to get medical info and record it into another channel. Since we implemented the cards’ access control with the help of smart contracts, it is not possible for third parties – if it’s neither parents nor a pediatrician – to obtain medical records.

Not only healthcare but various industries needed the same pattern — anywhere you need to manage confidential obligations without passing everything through a central authority.

We are able to create a solution where everyone is working together while ensuring confidentiality, scalability, and security. If you want to figure out more of our expertise, please contact us.