Soramitsu Co., Ltd., developer of open source distributed ledger and smart contracts platform Iroha, has submitted and had its platform accepted to the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project as an incubation sub-project. Iroha will join IBM’s Fabric and Intel’s Sawtooth Lake as the third distributed ledger project with incubation status. The platform was proposed to the Hyperledger Project by Soramitsu, NTT Data and Israeli startup Colu and others on September 26th, 2016, in Geneva, Switzerland. On October 13, 2016, Iroha was officially accepted into incubation status.
The platform aims to provide a secure and decentralized data management platform for financial institutions, as well as many other fields, such as healthcare and logistics. Using the custom ‘Sumeragi’ consensus algorithm, Iroha aims to provide consistent transaction finality within 2 seconds. To provide high throughput scaling to thousands of transactions per second, Iroha uses UDP multicast and C++ for data processing. Expected use-cases for Iroha include settlement, contract management securities clearing, development of financial products, supply chain management, trade finance, notary and time stamp services, healthcare and IoT applications
To explore use cases and work to increase the viability of the Iroha platform, Sompo Holdings Inc. is working with Soramitsu to create derivatives on top of the distributed ledger. The University of Tokyo, the University of Aizu, and the Center for Global Communications of the International University of Japan, are also working with Soramitsu to study the economics of local currencies and their effects on regional development. Joint research in the area around Aizu, in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, will include experiments using local currencies running on Iroha.
In addition, with Rakuten Securities, Inc., Soramitsu has announced that they are working together to develop a Know Your Customer system using blockchain technology. Mizuho Information & Research Institute, Inc., is also exploring the use of Iroha.
