Motivation

The emergence of blockchain interoperability in the last few years has been playing a pivotal role in the development of blockchain technology. Hyperledger has been supporting multiple projects in this domain, leading to semantic and technical interoperability advancements. For example, Hyperledger has been investing resources in the adoption of different interoperability standards, such as the Secure Asset Transfer Protocol (SATP), being standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Recent research shows that interoperability has been maturing at a quick rate, with some challenges in security, privacy, and organizational interoperability (see https://techrxiv.figshare.com/articles/preprint/SoK_Security_and_Privacy_of_Blockchain_Interoperability/24595764). Organizational interoperability refers to the capacity of companies or organizations to establish consortia that adhere to predefined cross-chain rules. The aim is to facilitate interactions with the hope of attaining privacy assurances while upholding security standards (see https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/A_Brief_History_of_Blockchain_Interoperability/23418677). 

However, security, privacy, and organizational interoperability are still the most prominent challenges in the space. This internship attempts to partially address these issues.

Description 

This internship connects these three dots by offering the ability to Hyperledger Cacti to create robust consortia that adhere to privacy and security needs, required by organizations leveraging our open-source project.

The present internship compresses the development and studying of the API Server, a core component of the Cacti Node. The mentee will develop API Server support for gRPC and the Connect protocols. Furthermore, an integration with SATP to create consortia will be performed. This can be achieved with some scripts for the end user to generate API Servers and SATP consortia configurations, served by a simple UI. This could become the new de-facto Cacti UI.

Learning Objectives

This mentorship intends to yield a fruitful learning experience across several dimensions:

General:

• Open-source and teamwork: You will learn how to contribute to an open-source project, test, and also document your work; You will be aware of the main efforts of the Hyperledger technologies, and how blockchain interoperability relates to that; you will interact with the Hyperledger community.
• Technical: You will refine your understanding of blockchain technology; You will strengthen your understanding of blockchain interoperability, taking a step forward to become an expert; you will refine your programming skills.
• Scientific: you will learn, or perfect your knowledge, on the research of a challenging topic; which opens an opportunity to write a scientific paper that may have a high impact on academia.

Specific

• Understand organizational interoperability, and extend SATP’s stage 0 to accommodate learnings from this mentorship.
• Understand and extend the Cacti API Server to support gRPC/Connect.
• Understand SATP. Understand in detail SATP’s stage 0.
• Extend the Cacti API Server to generate consortium definitions, including SATP consortia.
• Create a UI for Cacti (React/Angular/Vue), that helps users create consortium definitions.

Expected Outcome and Deliverables

The expected outcome tackles the whole Hyperledger Ecosystem. In particular, the project includes Hyperledger Cactus.

• Code addressing learning objectives
• Brief report on the conducted implementation and experiments
• Generalization of our results to achieve organizational interoperability
• Scientific paper (or technical report) on the achieved results, that can be used to disseminate the knowledge created on this mentorship

Relation to Hyperledger and Impact on the community

Hyperledger Cacti is a blockchain interoperability project. Cacti connects to several other projects: Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu, and others. We expect to use Cacti due to its relation to the cross-chain ecosystem.

This project will enable for the first time a concise way for organizations to organize on creating the infrastructure to enable interoperability across their Hyperledger chains.

Recommended Skills

Must:

• Willing to contribute to a meaningful mission, with an open-source mentality
• Willingness to develop teamwork skills
• Solid understanding of blockchain technology
• Background in computer science, computer engineering, or equivalent
• Experience with NodeJS, Typescript, Git, Linux terminal commands, Docker 101
• Pre-read SATP-Core draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/satp/about/

Nice to have: 

• Research experience (if you don’t, no worries – we can help!)
• Understanding of blockchain interoperability (please refer to the recommended papers)

Mentor(s) Names and Contact Info

Name: Rafael Belchior

Company affiliation: Blockdaemon & INESC-ID, Técnico Lisboa

Chat ID (Discord): rafaelapb

Name: André Augusto

Company affiliation: INESC-ID, Técnico Lisboa

Chat ID (Discord): andreaugusto

Name: Peter Somogyvari

Company affiliation: Accenture

Chat ID (Discord): peter_somogyvari

Additional Information

Blockchain Interoperability recommended resources:

Survey on Blockchain Interoperability

Secure Asset Transfer Protocol (SATP) specification — a unidirectional asset transfer protocol

Hyperledger Cacti project: https://github.com/hyperledger/cacti

Paper on the different types of interoperability: https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/A_Brief_History_of_Blockchain_Interoperability/23418677

Paper on security and privacy of blockchain interoperability: https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.24595764.v2