The Karma – is a blockchain-based charity foundation platform implemented on the top of Hyperledger Fabric. The Karma platform allows charitable organizations and funds to create and manage different philanthropic projects, accept donations, and present the auditable public trail of all transactions and other activities.
The Karma is developed for fundraising in a trustful environment. The blockchain network consists of reliable, publicly known organizations with impeccable reputations. Such blockchain features as non-repudiation, immutability, and provenance guarantee the transparency of all operations of the organizations within the network. Thus, the Karma platform can help build trust by preventing the consequences of dishonest actions and identifying the activities of fraudulent organizations.
While the Karma platform can help build trust and increase transparency for charity organizations, it does not intend to replace the traditional fundraising channels. However, implementation of new technology and innovation, with the increase in transparency, can attract new donors who, due to personal reasons, do not trust the existing ways of collecting donations.
Currently, most blockchain projects in NPOs are implemented on the permissionless blockchain, which has limited control over the validators responsible for the authenticity of transactions. The Karma project demonstrates the novel approach that implements permissioned blockchain technology on the public charity platform.
Hyperledger Fabric is considered one of the most distinguished permissioned blockchain implementations with a novel architecture explicitly developed to create enterprise-grade applications.
Hyperledger Fabric-based networks are managed by a consortium of organizations that determines the network configuration, the basic rules for the interaction of organizations, and adding new organizations, excluding existing ones.
A trusted set of validators endorses all operations within the Karma platform, validates the contents of the transactions, and keeps copies of the shared log with all transaction records.
Therefore, all activities and operations of charitable organizations become public and can be easily verified. Besides, the donor can check the entire track of donated funds, from the initial source to the target group which builds trust and increase the donor’s reliance on the integrity of the charity organization.
The platform is developed based on open-source libraries. Business logic is embedded and encapsulated in auditable smart contracts distributed among validating nodes belonging to platform validators. Since all validators are independent and decentralized, interacting according to the Byzantine and fault-tolerant consensus algorithm, and the state is contained in an immutable distributed ledger, participants can be confident in the system’s integrity.
- Renat Gubaev
- Artem Barger
- Olga Ilyina
- Alexander Zemtsov
- Ksenia Tagirova
- Nikita Loshkarev
- Alexander Belenov
See MAINTAINERS.md.