3. Use Case Scenarios

We list a number of use cases and specific advantages that Hyperledger Iroha can introduce to these applications. We hope that the applications and use cases will inspire developers and creators to further innovation with Hyperledger Iroha.

3.1. Certificates in Education, Healthcare

Hyperledger Iroha incorporates into the system multiple certifying authorities such as universities, schools, and medical institutions. Flexible permission model used in Hyperledger Iroha allows building certifying identities, and grant certificates. The storage of explicit and implicit information in users’ account allows building various reputation and identity systems.

By using Hyperledger Iroha each education or medical certificate can be verified that it was issued by certain certifying authorities. Immutability and clear validation rules provide transparency to health and education significantly reducing the usage of fake certificates.

3.1.1. Example

Imagine a medical institution registered as a hospital domain in Hyperledger Iroha. This domain has certified and registered workers each having some role, e.g. physician, therapist, nurse. Each patient of the hospital has an account with full medical history. Each medical record, like blood test results, is securely and privately stored in the account of the patient as JSON key/values. Rules in hospital domain are defined such that only certified medical workers and the user can access the personal information. The medical data returned by a query is verified that it comes from a trusted source.

Hospital is tied to a specific location, following legal rules of that location, like storing personal data of citizens only in specific regions(privacy rules). A multi-domain approach in Hyperledger Iroha allows sharing information across multiple countries not violating legal rules. For example, if the user makoto@hospital decides to share personal case history with a medical institution in another country, the user can use grant command with permission can_get_my_acc_detail.

Similar to a medical institution, a registered university in Hyperledger Iroha has permissions to push information to the graduated students. A diploma or certificate is essentially Proof-of-Graduation with a signature of recognized University. This approach helps to ease hiring process, with an employer making a query to Hyperledger Iroha to get the acquired skills and competence of the potential employee.

3.2. Cross-Border Asset Transfers

Hyperledger Iroha provides fast and clear trade and settlement rules using multi-signature accounts and atomic exchange. Asset management is easy as in centralized systems while providing necessary security guarantees. By simplifying the rules and commands required to create and transfer assets, we lower the barrier to entry, while at the same time maintaining high-security guarantees.

3.2.1. Example

For example [1], a user might want to transfer the ownership of a car. User haruto has registered owner-asset relationship with a car of sora brand with parameters: {"id": "34322069732074686520616E73776572", "color": "red", "size": "small"}. This ownership is fixed in an underlying database of the system with copies at each validating peer. To perform the transfer operation user haruto creates an offer, i.e. a multi-signature transaction with two commands: transfer to user haru the car identifier and transfer some amount of usd tokens from haru to haruto. Upon receiving the offer haru accepts it by signing the multi-signature transaction, in this case, transaction atomically commits to the system.

Hypeledger Iroha has no built-in token, but it supports different assets from various creators. This approach allows building a decentralized exchange market. For example, the system can have central banks from different countries to issue assets.

[1]Currently not implemented

3.3. Financial Applications

Hyperleger Iroha can be very useful in the auditing process. Each information is validated by business rules and is constantly maintained by distinct network participants. Access control rules along with some encryption maintain desired level of privacy. Access control rules can be defined at different levels: user-level, domain-level or system-level. At the user-level privacy rules for a specific individual are defined. If access rules are determined at domain or system level, they are affecting all users in the domain. In Hyperledger Iroha we provide convenient role-based access control rules, where each role has specific permissions.

Transactions can be traced with a local database. Using Iroha-API auditor can query and perform analytics on the data, execute specific audit software. Hyperledger Iroha supports different scenarios for deploying analytics software: on a local computer, or execute code on specific middleware. This approach allows analyzing Big Data application with Hadoop, Apache, and others. Hypeledger Iroha serves as a guarantor of data integrity and privacy (due to the query permissions restriction).

3.3.1. Example

For example, auditing can be helpful in financial applications. An auditor account has a role of the auditor with permissions to access the information of users in the domain without bothering the user. To reduce the probability of account hijacking and prevent the auditor from sending malicious queries, the auditor is typically defined as a multi-signature account, meaning that auditor can make queries only having signatures from multiple separate identities. The auditor can make queries not only to fetch account data and balance but also all transactions of a user, e.g. all transfers of user haruto in domain konoha. To efficiently analyze data of million users each Iroha node can work in tandem with analytics software.

Multi-signature transactions are a powerful tool of Hyperledger Iroha that can disrupt tax system. Each transaction in a certain domain can be as a multi-signature transaction, where one signature comes from the user (for example asset transfer) and the second signature comes from special taxing nodes. Taxing nodes will have special validation rules written using Iroha-API, e.g. each purchase in the certified stores must pay taxes. In other words, Iroha a valid purchase transaction must contain two commands: money transfer(purchase) to the store and money transfer(tax payment) to the government.

3.4. Identity Management

Hyperledger Iroha has an intrinsic support for identity management. Each user in the system has a uniquely identified account with personal information, and each transaction is signed and associated with a certain user. This makes Hyperledger Iroha perfect for various application with KYC (Know Your Customer) features.

3.4.1. Example

For example, insurance companies can benefit from querying the information of user’s transaction without worrying about the information truthfulness. Users can also benefit from storing personal information on a blockchain since authenticated information will reduce the time of claims processing. Imagine a situation where a user wants to make a hard money loan. Currently, pre-qualification is a tedious process of gathering information about income, debts and information verification. Each user in Hyperledger Iroha has an account with verified personal information, such as owning assets, job positions, and debts. User income and debts can be traced using query GetAccountTransactions, owning assets using query GetAccountAssets and job positions using GetAccountDetail. Each query returns verified result reducing the processing time of hard money loan will take only a few seconds. To incentivize users to share personal information, various companies can come up with business processes. For example, insurance companies can create bonus discounts for users making fitness activities. Fitness applications can push private Proof-of-Activity to the system, and the user can decide later to share information with insurance companies using GrantPermission with permission can_get_my_acc_detail.

3.5. Supply Chain

Governance of a decentralized system and representing legal rules as a system’s code is an essential combination of any supply chain system. Certification system used in Hyperledger Iroha allows tokenization of physical items and embedding them into the system. Each item comes with the information about “what, when, where and why”.

Permission systems and restricted set of secure core commands narrows the attack vector and provides effortlessly a basic level of privacy. Each transaction is traceable within a system with a hash value, by the credentials or certificates of the creator.

3.5.1. Example

Food supply chain is a shared system with multiple different actors, such as farmers, storehouses, grocery stores, and customers. The goal is to deliver food from a farmer’s field to the table of a customer. The product goes through many stages, with each stage recorded in shared space. A customer scans a code of the product via a mobile device, in which an Iroha query is encoded. Iroha query provides a full history with all stages, information about the product and the farmer.

For example, gangreen is a registered farmer tomato asset creator, he serves as a guarantor tokenizing physical items, i.e. associating each tomato with an Iroha tomato item. Asset creation and distribution processes are totally transparent for network participants. Iroha tomato goes on a journey through a multitude of vendors to finally come to user chad.

We simplified asset creation to just a single command CreateAsset without the need to create complex smart contracts. One the major advantages of Hyperledger Iroha is in its ease, that allows developers to focus on the provided value of their applications.

3.6. Fund Management

With the support of multisignature transactions it is possible to maintain a fund by many managers. In that scheme investment can only be made after the confirmation of the quorum participants.

3.6.1. Example

The fund assets should be held at one account. Its signatories should be fund managers, who are dealing with investments and portfolio distributions. That can be added via AddSignatory command. All of the assets should be held within one account, which signatories represent the fund managers. Thus the concrete exchanges can be performed with the multisignature transaction so that everyone will decide on a particular financial decision. The one may confirm a deal by sending the original transaction and one of managers’ signature. Iroha will maintain the transaction sending so that the deal will not be completed until it receives the required number of confirmation, which is parametrized with the transaction quorum parameter.