Hyperledger Foundation Hyperledger Global Forum 2021, 9 Jun 2021

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From YouTube: Keynote: Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Update - Arnaud Le Hors, IBM Day 01 Segment 02

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Keynote: Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Update - Arnaud Le Hors, Senior Technical Staff Member, Blockchain & Web Open Technologies, IBM - Day 1 Segment 2 -Americas/Europe
Sessions Details & Slides (if available)- https://sched.co/jXeg

To learn more about Hyperledger, the open source community focused on developing a suite of stable frameworks, tools and libraries for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments. Which serves as a neutral home for various distributed ledger frameworks including Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, Indy, as well as tools like Hyperledger Caliper and libraries like Hyperledger Ursa click here: https://www.hyperledger.org/

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Hyperledger – Open Source Blockchain Technologies

Hyperledger is an open source community focused on developing a suite of stable frameworks, tools and libraries for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments.
It serves as a neutral home for various distributed ledger frameworks including Hyperledger Besu, Fabric, Sawtooth, Indy, as well as tools like Hyperledger Avalon, Cactus and libraries like Hyperledger Aries, Ursa. Learn more about Hyperledger projects: https://www.hyperledger.org/use

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A

Thank you. Thank you, brian hello. Everyone welcome it's quite an exciting day. I hope you will enjoy this.

A

I was I set myself for a pretty much impossible mission, which is to give you a complete overview of what's going on in hyperledger land, and so I will start with talking about what's going on with the tsc itself and then give you a little bit of a test of what's going on in all the different projects, working groups, etc.

A

So without further ado you know, let's start with the tsc itself, um so the work we do is kind of trying to manage all the different projects, all the different activities that are happening from a technical point of view and gave everybody some kind of you know, organization structure. So we have a clear process on how you know a project go through different phases of maturity and so on. So we actually have a decision log that we maintain and when issues come up, they get added to the decision.

A

Log, obviously, and then we we try to solve them and improve the overall organization, and so one important decision we took over a year ago is when we hyperledgers started with a fairly small number of projects. uh We had a technical string committee with nine people.

A

uh It became pretty clear that you know after five years, given the number of projects we had, we needed to have a bigger tsc to have better representation, more diversity, and so we actually changed to 15 seats, and I think it was a very successful transition because we effectively have much more diversity now, both in terms of actual gender, but also in the representation of the different projects within hyperledger.

A

We have a project lifecycle that the project go through, they starting incubation, and then we had this thing called active status. When you know, project had grown up into active community with uh clearly defined processes, ci and whatnot, and this term was always confusing and we actually borrowed from the cncf.

A

The the the term graduated. Instead, it's a fairly small change, but we hope that this will actually clarify what this is about, and so we rename the active status to graduated.

A

And so um hopefully this will be clear because it's about the status of the community and how the project behave, and there are plenty of projects in incubation that are very active. So hopefully that will clarify this. um We removed the requirement to have a lab sponsor. So labs is an environment we created several years ago to help uh provide an area where people could actually experiment with new projects uh start building a community, maybe around a project that has been going on for a while.

A

But it's not necessarily known publicly and uh the idea was you know the the process to go through an approval to create a project is pretty heavy because there is quite a bit of resources invested by hyperledger into projects and so having a lab space where the the bar to creating a lab is much much lower and you don't need tse approval, you just go ahead and create one and you can start working, and there was this notion of sponsor. We had put on this, but you know it seemed to be actually a barrier.

A

This is based on actual feedback we received, so we removed this to lower the barrier to creating labs and bring in more, you know, uh activity to the hyperledger, and so we've done a bunch of other things. Like you know, the hyperledger company is fairly fragmented for historical reasons, because we're different projects that don't actually share much in common, and so you know one of the members submit feedback we got was well. What can you do to try and break those silos?

A

And so we've tried to look at different activities we could take on, one of which was to actually have people come to the tse calls and present on the project to make them more visible known to everybody in terms of the project life cycle, one more change we added recently was a dormant status. There are projects, sometimes that want to just take a break and there's actually the project quilt is going through this right now. This is what prompted this we added the dormant status, which allows project to basically self-declare.

A

Okay, we're not going to do anything for the next few months, so consider dormant. It doesn't mean we're going away forever. It just means for the next few months. We are not going to do anything so um then we have this. You know the new activities that we're actually looking at are more around. We are looking at a badging system which, beyond this you know status for projects, um we're looking at something, that's finer grain that would give us a better way to measure with the the health of different projects.

A

uh We've been looking at issues related to developer certificate of origin. We're always trying to there's a trade-off between trying to you know, provide adequate protection from an iep point of view.

A

uh I'm talking about intellectual property here and, uh at the same time not putting too much burden on the possible contribution, especially by people who are not obviously actively contributing to high quality on a daily basis, and then there's the greenhouse, I'm sure you're familiar with this is the way we traditionally represented all the different projects within hyperledger, and this hyper this greenhouse, you know, there's a lot of feedback.

A

Again, we got um was that it's actually confusing, because there's all these different projects there actually sometimes dependencies between those projects, there's different relationships that are not surfaced through this, and so we actually have an effort on the way to look into updating the website, changing the greenhouse to something that would be easier to understand uh for for people and then in parallel to that we're actually.

A

Looking at the charter which has aged, uh we have evolved quite a bit of the charter, the initial charter, which actually only anticipated to have a single framework being developed. We obviously have a lot more than that today, so we're actually updating the charter, and then you know a big part of what we do, as I said, is manage the different projects right. We are looking at new proposals and then, as project mature, they can go through these different phases.

A

A big one is the graduated phase that I just talked about, and I'm happy to say that the aries project graduated this year and uh it's in my opinion, one of the most qualified projects. Interestingly enough, they didn't think so, but as part of the quality report they give to the tse, we prompted them to say, but why haven't you applied to graduate yet? And they said well, we didn't know we could qualify for this.

A

We actually kind of pushed them to look into it and I'm happy to say that they did qualify their their application went absolutely through very easily, and one of the reasons is because a big criteria for graduation is actually the the diversity in the community. This is something that often blocks projects that would otherwise qualify and aries is the most diverse project within hyperledger.

A

So let's move on to project updates quickly. So, as I said so, this is the list of graduated projects we have today. So as I was just talking about aries, so they actually enjoy over eight different implementations of what they call the interrupt profile version one. They have many dev deployment of the agent and they have actually agreed on the profile two zero spec, which they will provide further interoperability among clients.

A

In parallel, the bezu project has been working on the ethium improvement proposal, 1559, which actually focuses on issues related to gas usage, and this will actually be part of the release that will be uh deployed along with the fork that will happen in epm in july, and they will provide uh they will make transaction costs more predictable.

A

The fabric project went through some major revision with one significant event where we actually moved from the long term support uh branch to the 2.2 branch. So no longer nobody should ever use 1.4 anymore. They should actually switch to the 2.2 branch at the minimum.

A

At the same time, there are more development happening in 2.3 and 2.40, which is starting to be out. There was a pre-release recently that always brings more features to make things easier to get on board, etc.

A

The indie project uh has been known for to run, there's an instance of the indie network running for the sovereign foundation, but there are actually two new instances that were deployed, and this actually prompted the the community to say we should define a deep method called did, indeed that would be used by all public. Indeed, networks the era project has been going through, some major rewrite is they were initially written euro was written in java and for the version 2. They are rewriting it all in rust and they are going.

A

They are approaching the the first table preview release of that so tooth when also through some major reorganization, they actually split sawtooth in many different places. There is actually now a library that can be used extracted from sawtooth itself and used by different blockchain and dlc implementations.

A

The at the same time use the transact project that I've talked about next for transaction processing and the saber engine that they have in has been externalized to transact.

A

When it comes to projects and incubation, we have the avalon project that has been going through some releases as well. They are actually focusing on taking advantage of new sgx capabilities.

A

The borough project went through some interesting development around typescript code generation. That makes it easier for people to deploy contracts, submit transaction and so on. The cactus projects which has to do with interoperability is a move to a language agnostic, plug-in based architecture, to make it easier to integrate different blockchain into the cactus in a framework.

A

The caliper project, this connector api, also to make it easier to connect different blockchain systems into it and to also move away from a programmable system to more configuration based system which is more declarative and easier to use.

A

The cello project is going through a redesign to make it more decentralized and more flexible and then the explorer project added support for the latest fabric version. This is the 2.x version as a in addition to the one.x version, and they also give more insight into what fab is going on with the fabric network beyond just the blockchain itself. But you can actually access information such as the endorsement policy, the great project at the civil revision and the latest one is actually bringing new capabilities related to the gs1 product definitions.

A

The transact project, as I was talking about earlier, has generated pieces of sawtooth it's used. It has actually gone through major uh evolution that has led to reduction in latency and better performance, and it is actually used both by sawtooth and splinter, which is outside of hyperledger.

A

Finally, the ursa project, which is cryptographic library, had a major release in december and they are going through some major rewri reorganization of the code. I should say initially it was based around some projected usage and now that they have, you know a bit more experience with how people really use the library they are reorganizing, the library to make it better fitted to what how people actually use it. So this is for all the projects, but hyperledger is not limited to those projects.

A

We also have a lot of working groups, so there is an architecture working group which actually went through a quiet phase and as just relaunching, with an interoperability discussion that we'll talk more about next, we have the diversity civility and inclusion working group that developed a whole bunch of recommendations to you know be used across the hyperledger.

A

I know that they are meeting still regularly. They have a fairly low attendance and courage. People if they're inclined an interesting kind of topic to look into it and join. We have the learning material development working group, which is led by the amazing bobby muscara, who has a lot of energy and actually manages to get their group to help people physically.

A

You know, literally on board in hyperledger, find their ways through all the different projects that I'm talking about, and they actually maintain a page which gives you kind of like everything you need to know about what's happening to the today or this week in the in hyperledger. So it's an amazing piece of resource. I encourage you to look into it.

A

The performance and scalability working group also went through a quiet phase and is actually looking into relaunching they're discussing what they are going to do exactly, and then we have the technical working group in china, which really is uh designed so that there is such an activity around the blockchain in china. You know they felt like they need to have some kind of group where they could get together and talk. They work on many different aspects and it's a great piece of hyperledger.

A

That is worth mentioning so now I want to talk a little bit more about interpretability specifically, and if you look at the program for this conference, you'll see interpretability appears quite a bit. I really think that interpretly is becoming a hot topic in the blockchain space and it's you know, especially for the kind of blockchain we do, which is permission, networks and essentially we're building a lot of islands and from the very early on people, started saying: okay, but once we have built all these islands are we go?

A

How are we going to connect them, and I can tell you I also work with a lot of standards organization. There was, they were always asking me: oh no, should we start a standard and I was like wait. Wait it's way too early we're just still trying to develop the technology, give us a chance, but I do think now.

A

Maybe it's the time for interoperability and for proof of the interest in this just looking at hyper ledger, we have actually three different efforts: there's the cactus project, which actually started with two different efforts uh from accenture and fujitsu, but we also have two labs that were recently started, one from ib by ibm one by datachain, and so they all take different approaches to that very problem. What are we talking about? Just to give you a very quick intro and again, there are full sessions on data on this topic.

A

I encourage you to attend to know more, but the three main cases for intervality in blockchain uh data transfer. This is essentially being bought to query some data from one network to another and being able to verify the validity of this data. There is asset exchange.

A

This is imagine you have a on a network you're managing ownership of asset on another. You do payments and you want to sell the asset, so you want to basically pair the asset ownership exchange on one network with the payment on the other, and you need to make sure that those two transactions either fail or happen together. You can't have one or the other, and then there is asset transfer across networks.

A

This is actually moving an asset from one network to another, ensuring obviously that you're not losing the asset in between or you're, not creating assets out of binary. So there's all these activities going on and I personally got interested and looked into it and started asking people. So how does that work? How does this compare to this other approach and stuff?

A

And it became very quickly clear to me that there was a lot of misunderstanding of what each approach really entailed, and so we started the discussion, which is now hosted by the architecture working group which aims at defini defining actually developing a document that will give us a comparison of these different approaches, and the idea is that, once we have actually developed a common understanding, we can then talk about possibly what we could do in terms of collaborations between these different projects moving on quickly to hyperledger labs.

A

So hyperledger labs, as I said, are not the governance of tse, but they actually are the biggest source of innovation and new work within hyperledger, which is why I think it's very important to look into it. There's tremendous amount of activity happening in hyperledger labs and I really invite you to look into it.

A

I give you some numbers here and I try to get through the list, the other day and kind of define big high-level categories of where I thought these different projects fail, and you can see you know it's a very broad set of of topics uh just to name a few.

A

At the very end you know of my list there we have two new labs that just got launched recently uh that actually this firefly and fabric smart client to name them, and they actually, I think, take a hyperledger to a completely new set of uh topics, because it's moving up the stack so far.

A

We spent all of time basically working at the framework level at this fairly low level plumbing and in fact, when you look and talk to people who actually develop applications, you realize there's a lot more to it than the blockchain itself and those efforts are trying to move us up into this land that sits on top of the framework and try to be closer to the business developer and looking into what it's actually going to take to develop an application provide apis that are much higher level.

A

So again, I encourage you to look into this, so the tsc. To finish on this, I'm trying to look back to my topic in the first place is you know officially, our mission is to define what gets done and how it gets done. Of course, you know we are trying to be fairly lightweight.

A

We try to lay as much freedom as possible to the project, all the while giving them. You know a proper structure, so they can effectively work and that we have some consistency across the different projects, but so the tsc is very open. We have weekly calls we. You know there are 15 members, as I said, but we often have 30 or more people join. I invite you to to join our call. The project calls are announced and um the I always post the agenda beforehand. I invite everybody to come in and join us.

A

So there's a mailing list and to finish I'm out of time, I invite you to get involved. The tse is not happening out of thin air, we're all members of the technical community, everybody who's involved in technical work qualifies to nominate themselves for the election. We will have a new election in the fall and I encourage you to nominate yourself and it's not to at least participate and vote. Thank you very much have a good event.

B

Wow, thank you so much arno. um You know listening to you talk and give these overviews it's kind of like wearing a jet pack and hovering over disneyland and seeing all of the great stuff happening all over disneyland and oh fantasyland is being remodeled and there's a new ride over here. um It's overwhelming, but hopefully it helps give people a sense that there's so much dynamicism to the community and it's you know so much more than any one project or any one approach.

B

uh It really is a really diverse ecosystem and so lots of places for uh folks interested to start climbing in and get engaged. Thank you so much.