In 2021, The Linux Foundation continued to see organizations embrace open collaboration and open source principles, accelerating new innovations, approaches, and best practices. As a community, we made significant progress in the areas of cloud-native computing, 5G networking, software supply chain security, 3D gaming, and a host of new industry and social initiatives.

Download and read the report today.

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Why is there a need for a patent protection alliance for cryptocurrency technologies?

With the recent surge in popularity of cryptocurrencies and related technologies, Square felt an industry group was needed to protect against litigation and other threats against core cryptocurrency technology and ensure the ecosystem remains vibrant and open for developers and companies.

The same way Open Invention Network (OIN) and LOT Network add a layer of patent protection to inter-company collaboration on open source technologies, COPA aims to protect open source cryptocurrency technology. Feeling safe from the threat of lawsuits is a precursor to good collaboration.

• Locking up foundational cryptocurrency technologies in patents stifles innovation and adoption of cryptocurrency in novel and useful applications.
• The offensive use of patents threatens the growth and free availability of cryptocurrency technologies. Many smaller companies and developers do not own patents and cannot deter or defend threats adequately.

By joining COPA, a member can feel secure it can innovate in the cryptocurrency space without fear of litigation between other members. 

What is Square’s involvement in COPA?

Square’s core purpose is economic empowerment, and they see cryptocurrency as a core technological pillar. Square helped start and fund COPA with the hope that by encouraging innovation in the cryptocurrency space, more useful ideas and products would get created. COPA management has now diversified to an independent board of technology and regulatory experts, and Square maintains a minority presence.

Do we need cryptocurrency patents to join COPA? 

No! Anyone can join and benefit from being a member of COPA, regardless of whether they have patents or not. There is no barrier to entry – members can be individuals, start-ups, small companies, or large corporations. Here is how COPA works:

• First, COPA members pledge never to use their crypto-technology patents against anyone, except for defensive reasons, effectively making their patents freely available for all.
• Second, members pool all of their crypto-technology patents together to form a shared patent library, which provides a forum to allow members to reasonably negotiate lending patents to one another for defensive purposes.
• The patent pledge and the shared patent library work in tandem to help drive down the incidence and threat of patent litigation, benefiting the cryptocurrency community as a whole. 
• Additionally, COPA monitors core technologies and entities that support cryptocurrency and does its best to research and help address litigation threats against community members.

What types of companies should join COPA?

• Financial services companies and technology companies working in regulated industries that use distributed ledger or cryptocurrency technology
• Companies or individuals who are interested in collaborating on developing cryptocurrency products or who hold substantial investments in cryptocurrency

What companies have joined COPA so far?

• Square, Inc.
• Blockchain Commons
• Carnes Validadas
• Request Network
• Foundation Devices
• ARK
• SatoshiLabs
• Transparent Systems
• Horizontal Systems
• VerifyChain
• Blockstack
• Protocol Labs
• Cloudeya Ltd.
• Mercury Cash
• Bithyve
• Coinbase
• Blockstream
• Stakenet

How to join

Please express interest and get access to our membership agreement here: https://opencrypto.org/joining-copa/

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Read More at JAXenter

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Some of these solutions are sold to companies as an all in one solution, slightly deviating from some of the core decentralized and open-sourced pillars of the technology, but the more popular ones are open-sourced and constantly being developed. The likes of Hyperledger Fabric, as well as Sawtooth and Besu, R3 Corda, and Quorum are all open source solutions that have been tracked for developer activity by Blockchain service firm Chainstack.

[Source: Forbes]

The post The Importance Of Growing Developer Action On Open Source Enterprise Blockchain Solutions appeared first on Linux.com.

RAP is fully implemented and undergoing code review. It will go live on Zcoin’s network by the end of January next year.

[Source: TFiR]

The post Zcoin’s Receiver Address Privacy (RAP) To Go Live Soon appeared first on Linux.com.

Viewed as an open-source unicorn, Bitcoin is ultimately a portent of a trend to come, Srinivasan argued: that protocols will compete with companies in the not-so-distant future.

[Source: Nasdaq]

The post BTCPay Server Is Bitcoin’s Open-Source Unicorn appeared first on Linux.com.

The firms are developing pluggable components for the network that could enable regulators to supervise contract deployments, asset holdings and transfers, as well as the enforcement of anti money laundering regulations, Bo Wang, a Nervos researcher, told CoinDesk.

[Source: CoinDesk]

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The post Ethereum Client Becomes First Public Blockchain Project on Hyperledger appeared first on Linux.com.

Sawtooth simplifies blockchain application development by separating the core system from the application domain. Application developers can specify the business rules appropriate for their application, using the language of their choice, without needing to know the underlying design of the core system.

Sawtooth is also highly modular. This modularity enables enterprises and consortia to make policy decisions that they are best equipped to make. Sawtooth’s core design allows applications to choose the transaction rules, permissioning, and consensus algorithms that support their unique business needs.

For those who are not familiar with Hyperledger project Intro to Hyperledger Family and Hyperledger Blockchain Ecosystem and Hyperledger Design Philosophy and Framework Architecture articles are strongly recommended.

The features offered by Hyperledger Sawtooth are the following:

• A truly distributed DLT: The Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain network is made up of validator nodes. The ledger is shared between all validator nodes and each node has the same information. They participate in a consensus to manage the network.
• Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) consensus and support for large-scale networks: Hyperledger Sawtooth includes a novel consensus algorithm, PoET. PoET is a Byzantine Fault-tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm that supports large-scale networks with minimal computing and much more efficient resource consumption compared to proof of work algorithms. PoET was invented by Intel and utilizes the special CPU instruction set called Software Guard Extensions (SGX), to achieve the scaling benefits of the Nakamoto-style consensus algorithms. Each node waits for a random period of time and the first node to finish is the leader and commits the next block.
• Fast transaction performance: Hyperledger Sawtooth keeps the latest version of assets in the global state and transactions in the block chain on each network node. This means that you can look up the state quickly to carry out CRUD actions, which provides fast transaction processing. Sawtooth requires transactions to be processed in batches and supports parallel scheduling of transactions. Parallel transaction execution not only accelerates the execution of transactions but also correctly handles the double spending problem known as Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO).
• Support for a broad variety of languages: Sawtooth supports the implementation of transaction families (safe and smart contracts) in a wide variety of programming languages, including Python, Go, Rust, Java, and JavaScript.
• The ability to configure private, public, and consortium blockchain networks:

Sawtooth can be configured with different permissions to build private, consortium, or public networks by specifying which nodes are allowed to join the validator network and participate in the consensus, and which clients are allowed to submit batches and transactions.

In this article, I give step-by-step guide for building blockchain applications using Hyperledger Sawtooth. Good knowledge of blockchain concepts, JavaScript and Python as well as basic skills in Linux OS is required in order to complete tutorials listed on this article.

In short, we follow below steps:

1. Install Hyperledger Sawtooth on a cloud service like AWS
2. Configure Sawtooth validators and REST API
3. Design a namespace and address for a transaction family
4.  Implement a transaction family
5. Build a transaction processor
6.  Grant permission on the Sawtooth network
7. Develop client applications with the Sawtooth REST API and SDK

To help blockchain developers to find their feet in Hyperledger Sawtooth development, I’ve written a series of hands-on tutorials to cover each topic in depth as follows.

Install Hyperledger Sawtooth

Follow Install and Work with Hyperledger Sawtooth recipe.

Configure Sawtooth Validators and REST API

Follow Configuring Hyperledger Sawtooth Validator and REST API on AWS recipe.

Design a Namespace and Address for Transaction Family and Implement Transaction Family

Follow Designing Namespace and Address for Hyperledger Sawtooth Transaction Family recipe

Build a Transaction Processor and Grant Permission on the Sawtooth Network

Follow Building Transaction Handler and Processor for Hyperledger Sawtooth with Python SDKrecipe

Develop Client Applications with the Sawtooth REST API and SDK

Follow Transaction Processor and Python Egg For Hyperledger Sawtooth recipe.

About Authors

This article is written by Matt Zand (Founder of High School Technology Services) in collaboration with Brian Wu who is a senior blockchain developer at DC Web Makers.

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