Microsoft, Salesforce and the Ethereum Foundation are among the major new companies joining enterprise blockchain platform Hyperledger. The company’s executive director, Brian Behlendorf, confirmed the news to Cointelegraph ahead of a public unveiling at the ongoing Synchronize Europe conference in London on June 18. Part of a monthly update on new members of Hyperledger, Behlendorf said June’s rollout included the Ethereum Foundation as a non-profit member, while supply chain standards body GS1 is also now on board. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger already counts IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Boerse and others among its participants. “It shows the expanding footprint …

CIP, a facilitator of Brazilian banking and financial infrastructure, has officially launched its blockchain ID platform via a partnership with IBM using Hyperledger Fabric, Cointelegraph Brazil reported on June 12. The identity solution, dubbed “Device ID,” will see participation from nine banks, and is reportedly integrated into Brazil’s domestic clearing system, the Brazilian Payment System (SPB). Its aim is to authenticate and verify digital signatures using mobile devices, ostensibly to guard against financial crime and unauthorized use of the financial system. “Brazilian banks have been studying blockchain technology applications for a long time, but they weren't all together. So we …

Online retail giant Amazon has partnered with United Kingdom-based insurance agency Legal & General to create a blockchain system for managing corporate pension deals, according to a report by Reuters on June 11. Legal & General will reportedly make use of the Amazon Managed Blockchain for its bulk annuity transactions, which happen when companies transfer their pension schemes to Legal & General for insurance. According to an article by the Financial Times, companies make bulk annuity transactions to insurers like this so that they are not ultimately responsible for personally paying their employees’ pensions. CEO of Legal & General Reinsurance …

United States-based retail giant Target is creating an open source blockchain project for supply chain tracking, according to an official blog post from the company’s VP of architecture on April 22. According to the post, Target ran a pilot test using blockchain technology to certify its paper products along the supply chain in 2018. The blockchain used in the test period was reportedly made open source on GitHub recently as “ConsenSource” — at least as far back as two months ago, judging by the repository’s update history. According to the GitHub documentation, ConsenSource is built on blockchain platform Hyperledger Sawtooth, …

Cryptocurrencies have gone a long way since the day when, nine years ago, Laszlo Hanyecz had paid 10,000 bitcoins for two large Papa John’s pizzas, marking the first purchase of tangible goods for digital money. Although bitcoin is still far from being universally accepted by retailers, thousands of merchants around the world are taking crypto in exchange for goods — and their ranks grow daily. The latest of the big developments in this vein came up at this year’s Consensus conference, as blockchain startup Flexa made public its partnership with a number of major U.S. retailers. Flexa’s payments app, Spedn, …

Major United States-based cloud software firm Salesforce, has introduced its own blockchain platform, the firm said in a live stream on May 29. The new product, Salesforce Blockchain, is based on the firm’s own application builder Salesforce Lightning and open source blockchain technology by Hyperledger. Salesforce Blockchain is a low-code blockchain platform that provides companies with the tools to build smart contracts, app and networks in order to share verified data using distributed ledger technology (DLT). The product also enables the automation of a number of processes based on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Currently available to selected partners, Salesforce Blockchain …

The Dubai Land Department (DLD), the real estate arm of the Executive Council of Dubai, has partnered with UAE-based Mashreq Bank to release a blockchain-based mortgage platform, according to a report by The National on May 28. According to the report, the blockchain-based platform will act as a repository for mortgage records, as well as a way to confirm that the mortgages comply with registration policies. Additionally, the platform will accommodate on-going updates that occur after a property sale, such as recording liquidation and payment defaults or changes to the mortgages. The new blockchain platform is part of the DLD’s …

The Central Bank of Iran (CBI), via its Informatics and Services Corporation (ISC) and in conjunction with Areatak — a Tehran-based blockchain solutions provider — is developing a national blockchain project for its banking and financial sector. Called the Borna platform, Iran hopes to use the project to revamp its banking ecosystem, creating a digital financial economy that will replace the current legacy system. There are also future plans to open up the platform to local private establishments, creating a unitary monetary and banking system for the country. Given the country’s current standoff with the United States and the renewal …

This interview has been edited and condensed. Hyperledger, an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation, was created in 2016 to support the development of blockchain-based, enterprise-grade distributed ledger frameworks and tools. All the members of Hyperledger — including such major actors as Intel, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Alibaba Cloud, Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom and many others — find their interest in blockchain technology and discuss it with Marta Piekarska, who is in charge of the project’s ecosystem. We met Marta at the Anon Blockchain Summit in Vienna and talked about computer science, conservative vs. progressive sectors of economy, …

Hyperledger has introduced a set of tools dubbed “Hyperledger Aries” aimed at interoperability of different types of blockchain-based data. The company announced the development in a blog post on May 14. Hyperledger Aries is a set of tools that purportedly enables the exchange of blockchain-based data, supports peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging and facilitates interactions between different blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies. Per the post, Hyperledger rolled out the project in order to provide code for P2P interaction and advance interoperability, among other objectives. The product includes a blockchain interface layer, cryptographic wallet, encrypted messaging system, application programming interface-like use cases …

Researchers have re-engineered the Hyperledger Fabric to support almost seven times more transactions per second (TPS), according to a May 2 news release from Canada’s University of Waterloo. A new series of optimizations increased the volume of data that the blockchain — used by financial institutions, IT giants and engineering companies — can process. Where it formerly maxed out around 3,000 TPS, the researchers claim they managed to achieve 20,000 TPS. The university’s work focused on improving “end-to-end transaction throughput” by redesigning Fabric’s ordering service, transaction service and data management layer. This means that the blockchain is more practical for …

Financial news outlet Forbes has released a list of “Blockchain’s Billion Dollar Babies,” or companies implementing blockchain technology that have minimum revenues or valuations of $1 billion, on April 16. The list includes companies in the cryptocurrency and blockchain development spaces, in addition to traditional financial firms like banks and clearing houses, food companies, supply chain management firms and others. Most of the companies listed are household names like Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, ING, Mastercard, Microsoft and Nestle. Cryptocurrency-related companies featured on the list include United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, European mining and hardware firm Bitfury, and blockchain-based financial services network …