Jan 13

Driving new markets: The opportunities ahead for enterprise blockchain technologies

By Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger Foundation and General Manager, Blockchain and Identity for the Linux Foundation Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner

While volatility reigned supreme in 2022, here at Hyperledger Foundation we are looking ahead with great excitement to what is possible in 2023. When CEOs of companies like Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon are penning articles on the long-term value of distributed ledger and blockchain technology, we know the work our community is doing is building markets and creating opportunities. Hyperledger Foundation has been at the forefront of advancing open-source technologies that are transforming the way businesses operate. Since 2016, organizations around the world have been deploying these technologies to optimize speed, security, efficiency and trust in global markets and industries.

Blockchain’s value has already been established in a number of enterprise use cases: provenance tracking, logistics, cross border payments and more, where it is adding efficiency and cutting costs, while saving time and labor. One such proven example is the application of Hyperledger technologies in the partnership between MineHub and KrypC that has utilized Hyperledger Fabric to drastically improve upon the infrastructure necessary to power the supply chain of the mining industry. GSBN has also built a Global Trade Operating Platform with Hyperledger Fabric as the foundation. The historical lack of on-demand data in the shipping industry left the supply chain vulnerable to disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic. But with a single, efficient, immutable source of on-demand data, such disruptions can be dealt with much more effectively.

Now, there are a number of new and increasingly interesting markets and applications, especially tied to digital assets and tokenization, that are moving to the forefront of this market. The traditional infrastructure that powers the global financial system is slow, especially in comparison to the benefits blockchain technology provides. While data and information can already traverse the globe in seconds or less, value is not yet fully capable of moving at this speed or with the same efficiency. Although assets may appear to move instantaneously with the various online financial tools currently at our disposal, the movement of value itself is still quite slow. Settlement time for transactions still takes days and requires very expensive and lengthy processes in order to complete transactions properly.

Blockchain technology’s ability to alleviate friction in our current regulatory, financial and operational systems is in its capabilities as a piece of highly effective transactional and record keeping machinery. Anything can be bought, sold, transferred and accounted for on a blockchain, with data pertaining to those transactions stored on a distributed and immutable ledger for everyone included in the network to see. Asset tokenization enables the purchase, sale and exchange of digital assets, representative of potentially any asset, traditional or otherwise. This process facilitates the transfer of off-chain real-world assets’ economic value and ownership onto the blockchain.

By accelerating and improving the fractionalization of new asset classes, tokenization will expand the range of available and acceptable collateral beyond traditional assets. Tokenized representations of traditional assets such as cash, bonds, securities and equities, and even physical commodities like gold, stand to be a crucial evolution that will underpin future market infrastructure, just as computerized ledgers were transformational to the previous paper-based generation.

The progress made possible by distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) has enabled a much more capable and comprehensive system to verify assets and track their value. The foundational code of digital smart contracts, which automate the execution of an agreement between parties, are central to enabling this progress. Codified to self-verify and self-execute, smart contracts scale down on the time, formality and costs associated with traditional methods, without compromising on authenticity or credibility. In the past, banks have had to commit robust teams to uphold transactions from client to client, processing each piece of data manually and redirecting value as necessary. With smart contracts, that process occurs automatically, making them more effective and efficient than any traditional centralized entity while also fostering trust and presenting more transparent governance.

The key to widespread adoption of new, automated systems as the rails for widespread, cross-market transactions is creating a trusted technology infrastructure. At Hyperledger Foundation, we believe that open, shared development of the foundational technologies are central to meeting diverse business, consumer, and regulatory needs. Only through the application of open-development and open-source DLTs can we create trusted technology to serve as the backbones for these new financial systems.

Asset tokenization on open-source, open-governed distributed ledgers offers a solution to much of the inherent economic friction of the current global economy and has the potential to unlock a staggering amount of value. And the work has already begun. Using its new tokenization platform, Goldman Sachs arranged a €100 million two-year digital bond for the European Investment Bank with two other banks, all based on a private blockchain. Using traditional financial instruments, it would take a bond sale like this roughly five days to settle. It took just 60 seconds when tokenized on a private blockchain. Reducing settlement time will lower costs across the entire market for banks, customers and even regulators, making markets incredibly more efficient.

The use cases for this technology extend into the public sector as well. Hyperledger’s DLTs have been at the forefront of innovation and tokenization in the global exploration and development of Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs. Our DLTs are built in the open, with vendor neutral governance and can be deployed in several production networks across sectors, including Central Banks. Central bank money traditionally takes the form of cash or reserves held by eligible financial institutions at the central bank. CBDCs, on the other hand, are a newly developed concept that could become a third version of a national currency that is tokenized and would rely on use of an electronic record or digital token to represent the digital form of a nation’s currency. There are a number of countries already working to develop CBDCs utilizing Hyperledger’s open-source, open-governance distributed ledgers Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu and Hyperledger Iroha.

Aside from transforming currencies and bonds, asset tokenization is being applied to a range of securities and other financial assets, including physical ones. Tokenized on-chain assets in particular have the potential to unlock access to liquidity in the market while increasing freedom and access for investor capital. Traditionally illiquid assets, such as real estate or fine art, can have their value unlocked through the process of tokenization, which opens the door to tremendous possibilities for new investment. Case in point: Global law firm DLA Piper recently launched its TOKO tokenization platform to issue non-fungible tokens across asset classes including real estate, fine art, debt and even intellectual property. Toko is a digital asset creation engine to solve inefficiencies in today’s capital markets by using DLTs to distribute, trade and settle transactions rapidly, bypassing the need for trusted third party intermediaries that are both expensive and slow. It is built using the combination of a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network and the Hedera Token Service.

The technology also facilitates positive environmental impacts and ESG reporting. For example, a recently concluded trial conducted by the United Nation, Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority successfully resulted in two separate prototypes of tokenized green bonds. Built using Hyperledger Besu along with technologies from Digital Asset and Allinfra Climate, the prototypes ensure the tracking of mitigation outcome interests (MOIs), an essential aspect of environmentally focused economic efforts.

This is just a sampling of the growing impact of asset tokenization. A new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and ADDX estimates that asset tokenization will reach $16 trillion by 2030, or 10% of global GDP. To put that figure in context, in 2020 the total assets under management for ETFs were $7 trillion, and total real estate investment trusts (REITs) were worth $2.5 trillion in 2021. As we already see across our community, the breadth of use cases for DLTs and tokenized assets stretches across industries, with the potential to dramatically improve upon much of the critical infrastructure that the global economy currently relies on.

Despite industry disruptions and market fluctuations, we are continuing to build enterprise-grade DLT technology that unlocks a previously unimaginable amount of capital and value. As we move forward into the new year, the Hyperledger Foundation is committed more than ever to fostering a robust and diverse ecosystem for open-source enterprise-grade blockchain technologies that will power new financial systems and models, while serving markets around the world. It’s what we call building better together. Come join us. All are welcome.

Oct 14

Love0

Staff Corner: Thanking community members for their contributions

By Ry Jones and David Boswell, Community Architects Blog, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner, Hyperledger Global Forum

Our community is strong and growing thanks to hundreds of community leaders around the world. We recently got back from Hyperledger Global Forum 2022 in Dublin where the strength of our community was displayed in force. While we were there, we had the opportunity to recognize our community members in a number of fun (and hopefully meaningful) ways.

This year, on the main stage, we announced the winners of our annual Community Recognition Awards:

This year’s honorees were:

Daniel Szegö, DLT Advisor, CBDC Think Tank Budapest – Recognised for hosting the most meetups of any organizer this year and doing events in three languages, In addition, he also actively brings community members together around Hyperledger Fabric and Kubernetes projects
Josh Kneubuhl, IBM Research, IBM – Recognized for his cross project and lab collaboration with the Hyperledger Fabric community.
Arun S M, Staff Software Engineer, Walmart Global Tech India – Recognized for his active role in welcoming new community members on Discord and as one of the leaders of the Hyperledger India Chapter.
Char Howland, Software Engineer, Indicio – Recognized for her active role in the Hyperledger Aries/Identity community, including running the identity implementers calls and welcoming new members to that growing community.
Nicko Guyer, Senior Full Stack Engineer, Kaleido – Recognized for being very active on Discord and Github and very good at onboarding new people into the Hyperledger FireFly community.
Andrew Whitehead, Senior Software Architect, Portage CyberTech – Recognized for being an active Hyperledger Aries contributor who helps with onboarding new people and does a lot of work on security.
Antoine Toulme, Senior Engineering Manager, Splunk – Recognized for being extremely responsive on the Hyperledger Besu channels as well as contributing workshops and more.
Marcos Sarres, Director Executivo, GoLedger – Recognized as a co-lead our Hyperledger Brazil Chapter and organizer of many very well received meetups for the community this year.
Vipin Bharathan, Principal Consultant, dlt.nyc – Recognized for running the Identity WG, serving as the Chair of our Financial Services SIG and doing so much to welcome others into our community.
Peter Somogyvari, Software Product Architecture Manager, Accenture – Recognized for always making the time to onboard and help new community members, taking on multiple mentees through our mentorship program and so much more.

Hyperledger Foundation Executive Governing Board Chair David Treat, Executive Director Daniela Barbosa and Senior Director of Community Architects David Boswell join Community Recognition Awards recipients Marcos Sarres of GoLedger, Arun S M of Walmart Global Tech India, Vipin Bharathan of dlt.nyc, Nicko Guyer of Kaleido and Josh Kneubuhl of IBM on stage at Hyperledger Global Forum 2022 in Dublin.

Daniela Barbosa presents Community Recognition Awards to Accenute’s Peter Somogyvari and Splunk’s Antoine Toulme

Throughout the event, we were also handing out small pieces of swag to thank the community members who were there. Taking the time to travel to the event and spend multiple days meeting and talking with others is an important contribution attendees were making to the health of the Hyperledger community. We wanted to recognize them for their time, effort and commitment.

One of the items we were giving out were Hyperledger coins that said “Community Code Collaboration Contribution” on the back and had 2022 on the front. Since the event this year was being held in Dublin, we designed the coins to have the two color look of a 2 euro coin.

We started making coins to thank community members – an idea long championed by our current TOC Chair, Tracy Kuhrt – in 2021. People seemed to like them so we wanted to do it again this year. It also seems fun to have an ongoing series of coins that change each year that people can collect to show how long they’ve been active in the community. We don’t know what a 2023 coin would look like yet, so feel free to send us suggestions.

For special occasions, we’ve also engraved the coins for some of the technical leaders in the community. Check out this video of a coin being engraved by a laser for Danno Ferrin, our TOC Vice Chair:

There are many other ways to recognize people for the contributions they make – one of Ry’s personal favorites is a comment in the NTPd source code. At the Hyperledger Foundation, we’ve also issued badges, given poker chips for events and other contributions, published Developer Showcase blog posts and have made stickers and shirts.

Different ways to recognize people will be relevant for different people. Some people may want a coin or shirt and others may not. We’re interested to hear what sort of recognition is important to you so we can make sure what we do is meaningful. Please send us your thoughts (email community-architects@hyperledger.org). And, if you’d like to earn a coin, a token, a badge or anything else, get involved in the community, and we’ll be happy to thank you for your contributions.

May 18

Love1

Staff Corner: Welcome to the new Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board chair, Accenture’s David Treat

By Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger Foundation and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation Blog, Governance, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner

Governance is crucial to enterprise-grade open source software development and to the mission of Hyperledger Foundation. While our community-elected Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is responsible for coordinating the technical direction of the Hyperledger Foundation and our project maintainers of the projects themselves, our Governing Board is the body that leads the foundation’s strategy, operations and marketing. Our Governing Board representatives are charged with ensuring transparency across our community, stability across our ecosystem and financial viability for our foundation. They also play an incredibly important role in helping us plan for the future in a fast evolving market.

Since its founding in 2016, Hyperledger Foundation has had two extremely committed and innovative Governing Board Chairs, Blythe Masters, former CEO of Digital Asset, who steered Hyperledger through its launch and early growth, and Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation at DTCC, who served in this annually elected chair role since January 2019. Rob oversaw an exciting growth period for the foundation while shepherding us through a global pandemic. Now, it is my pleasure to welcome the next leader, David Treat, Senior Managing Director, Global Metaverse Continuum Business Group & Blockchain Lead at Accenture.

*David Treat, Senior Managing Director, Global Metaverse Continuum Business Group & Blockchain Lead at Accenture and the newly appointed chair of the Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board*

David was a natural choice to be elected as the next chair of Hyperledger Foundation. He has been a member of the Governing Board since day one and is not only a leader in our community but across the industry. He is an active board member of a number of groups, including the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Global Blockchain Business Council and ID2020 Alliance, and is a member of the World Economic Forum C4IR Global Blockchain Council, a program advisor for the Chamber of Digital Commerce, and co-chair of the New York Fintech Innovation Lab.

He has been a driving force in Accenture’s commitments to Hyperledger Foundation, which ranges from being a leading sponsor of Hyperledger Global Forum and of Diversity, Civility and Inclusion efforts at the annual event to providing extensive technical and marketing leadership to ongoing and extensive code contributions. As a company, Accenture is a top five code committer and has contributed development resources to launching and maintaining Hyperledger Bevel and Hyperledger Cactus.

I personally look forward to partnering with David in building out new projects and communities that will advance identity, interoperability and the coming wave of blockchain-enabled innovation. We share a commitment to decentralization and enabling greater individual user transparency control and power. Working alongside with our board and our global community, it will be our joint mission to ensure that Hyperledger plays a key role in building not just the open source technologies for the new internet of ownership but also the market for Web3 and beyond.

“I have deep respect and appreciation for Blythe Masters and Rob Palatnick’s leadership of the Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board as well for all Governing Board members working to build the Hyperledger ecosystem and this market over the past six from early code concepts to a mature enterprise software landscape. Our community has established a critical foundation for the future. I look forward to serving and supporting the entire Hyperledger community as Board Chair as we continue to accelerate and deliver on the potential of distributed ledger technology to redefine the infrastructure that supports commerce, currency, communications, and identity particularly as the Metaverse Innovation wave advances. While it will take a lot of work to build open, shared and interoperable platforms, the Hyperledger community and leadership are charging ahead to deliver on this vision.” – David Treat, Senior Managing Director, Global Metaverse & Blockchain Lead at Accenture and the newly appointed chair of the Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board

Please join me in welcoming and congratulating David Treat as our new Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board chair! Click to tweet: Congratulations to @Accenture’s @DBTreat, new Governing Board chair for @Hyperledger Foundation

Dec 30

Love2

Staff Corner: 2021 in Review and a Look Forward

By Daniela Barbosa Blog, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner

As I look back at 2021, I am amazed by what we as a global community have achieved together in our journey to be the premier open source community of software developers building enterprise blockchain, distributed ledgers, and related technologies.

First, I want to thank everyone for your passion and commitment to the Hyperledger community. Without your contributions and support, we could not have achieved any of the highlights I have included below. There are thousands and thousands of you out there, touching so many aspects of our community and ecosystem, and I hope each of you sees how you have contributed to our successes this year and how you are helping us build upon them for 2022 and beyond.

The list below may seem overwhelming at first, but this is what we are creating worldwide. We have been busy, educating, building, improving, innovating and becoming leaders across multiple ecosystems.

For me, often it seems that not a day goes by without me discovering something new that our community is doing and building with Hyperledger technology. I know that this volume of activity makes it hard for people to understand what “Hyperledger” is, how they can use Hyperledger technology or simply how to get involved in our community so they can also learn, build and innovate.

This year, as we prepared to celebrate our 6th year anniversary, we acknowledged that the Hyperledger of today is not the same as the Hyperledger of 2016. In October we announced that Hyperledger is now Hyperledger Foundation. As our ecosystem and community grow, we need a clear identity for our organization that arches over all our projects, labs, regional chapters, working groups, special interest groups and overall collective effort to advance enterprise blockchain technology. The Hyperledger Foundation brand offers that clarity. It also positions us to fulfill our newly updated mission to be the premier community of software developers building enterprise grade open source software, in the form of platforms, libraries, tools and solutions, for multiparty systems using blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies.

This year, we have seen growth across all areas of the Hyperledger Foundation – from new projects to virtual events and growth in our ecosystem and community as outlined below and in the recent Hyperledger Foundation 2021 End-of-year Update on the Linux Foundation Blog. I believe that 2022 will be a year of acceleration for enterprise blockchain as I highlighted in this op-ed Up the adoption curve: why 2022 will be a year of acceleration for enterprise blockchain on the enterprise blockchain news website Ledger Insights.

This fall we also published an updated Hyperledger Foundation overview paper that provides a high-level overview of Hyperledger as an organization, including why it exists, what it does, and who is involved. It also covers our Hyperledger technologies and their impact on existing and new markets. Finally, this paper looks at the roadmap to widespread adoption of Hyperledger platforms, tools, and libraries to power a new generation of multiparty systems. If you have not had a chance to read it, I encourage you to.

Our 2021 Hyperledger Brand Study provided some insight on how Hyperledger is perceived in the market and confirms much of the progress both the industry and Hyperledger have made in just over five years.

In October, I took over as Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation after four years as Vice President of Worldwide Alliances serving our community worldwide. Over the last few months, I have spoken with many of you about what you see our community becoming and how you want to contribute, and I am really forward to working with you and our staff to make the Hyperledger Foundation a place for anyone who wants to advance, adopt and build the future of blockchain in the enterprise.

They say it takes a village, but leadership is also important so we are also grateful for the stewardship that Brian Behlendorf provided our Hyperledger community since 2016 and look forward to his successes as Executive Director of the new Linux Foundation project, Open Source Security Foundation.

Read More about this change in leadership

Passing the Baton by Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation, Linux Foundation
Hyperledger is almost six years old, but who’s counting by Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation, DTCC, and Chair of the Hyperledger Governing Board
Writing the Next Chapter for Hyperledger by Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation

As we head into 2022, I want to pause to also acknowledge the challenges and losses that many in our community have experienced as we collectively move through this global COVID pandemic.

On behalf of the entire Hyperledger Foundation team, I want to also congratulate all our communities for their successes under another extraordinarily challenging year and wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous 2022.

I hope you enjoy reading these fantastic highlights and reflecting on the incredible progress we have achieved together this year.

Sig

Daniela Barbosa
Executive Director, Hyperledger Foundation
The Linux Foundation

2021 Momentum

Membership

Today, Hyperledger Foundation membership includes the world leaders in enterprise blockchain including our premier members Accenture, ConsenSys, DTCC, Fujitsu, HItachi, IBM and JPMorgan. The Hyperledger ecosystem continues to grow across small, large and global members. This year we welcomed 28 new members across the globe from China, India, Spain, France, Germany, South Korea, German, Poland, Hong Kong and the United States. From large companies like Siemens, Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Software and Verizon to small and medium-sized industry leaders like ConsenSys Health, Kaleido, Rootchain, Indicio and more.

Investment from these leading organizations signifies a strong dedication to the advancement and sustainability of enterprise blockchain for years to come. Read all our 2021 new member announcements to learn about why these organizations joined the Hyperledger Foundation.

LEARN ABOUT MEMBERSHIP – BECOME A HYPERLEDGER MEMBER

Growth in Commercial Ecosystem

As commercial adoption of Hyperledger continues to grow and POCs move into production, companies look to the Hyperledger Foundation to identify vendors and partners to work with. The Hyperledger Certified Service Provider (HCSP) program is a recognized program of pre-qualified, vetted service providers that have deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Hyperledger. This year we welcomed six new HCSPs and now companies looking for help can choose from over 25 HCSPs, including leading global companies like Wipro, NEC, Avanza Innovations, ProInsight, Tencent, IntellectEU and more.

FIND A HYPERLEDGER CERTIFIED SERVICE PROVIDER (HCSP)

In the News: Hyperledger Members Building, Deploying and Growing

The media continued to highlight Hyperledger technologies being used across multiple sectors and use cases in 2021, with coverage bridging across blockchain industry publications like CoinDesk and Ledger Insights to mainstream and local media like Bloomberg, Irish Times and more. Articles include coverage of deployments, investments and acquisitions of Hyperledger members.

BROWSE 2021 ARTICLES ABOUT HYPERLEDGER MEMBERS

Telling our Story: Hyperledger Member Case Studies

Showing how Hyperledger technologies are being used is an important part of what the Hyperledger Foundation is tasked with. This year alone, the Hyperledger Foundation published 10 Member Case Studies highlighting how Hyperledger technologies are being used across many use cases and Hyperledger projects. These case studies help explain how distributed ledger technologies are being used and why Hyperledger technologies are selected. Learn more about how each case study was developed by reading our launch posts.

Read our 2021 Case Studies

KrypC- Managing the Metal and Mining Industry’s Supply Chain with Hyperledger Fabric

Industry: Supply Chain
Topics: Workflow, Layer 2, Private Data Collections
Projects: Hyperledger Fabric

Splunk correlates data across all datasets—including Hyperledger Fabric

Industry: Finance, Tech
Topics: Data visibility, content management
Projects: Hyperledger Fabric

How Tech Mahindra Deployed Hyperledger Fabric for the Digital Transformation of Abu Dhabi’s Land Registry

Industry: Government
Topics: Land Registries, Blockchain
Projects: Hyperledger Fabric

How we.trade Helps Businesses Grow With Digital Smart Contracts Powered by Hyperledger Fabric

Industry: Finance
Topics: Smart contracts, FinTech, Consortium blockchains
Projects: Hyperledger Fabric

RTI Blockchain & Ledger Leopard make tracking returnable transport items as easy as online banking with Hyperledger Besu

Industry: Load Carrier Management
Topics: Supply chain, Online banking
Projects: Hyperledger Besu

Thales and DigiCert team up to increase cybersecurity for Hyperledger Fabric

Industry: Cybersecurity
Topics: Public Key Infrastructure
Projects: Fabric

How Poste Italiane brings value to loyalty with Hyperledger Besu

Industry: Supply Chain, Retail
Topics: Customer Loyalty
Projects: Besu

How BondEvalue launched the world’s first fractional bond exchange with Hyperledger Sawtooth

Industry: Fintech, Government
Topics: Asia, Financial Exchange
Projects: Hyperledger Sawtooth

Dubai’s Digital Silk Road modernizes trade with Hyperledger Fabric

Industry: Supply Chain, Government
Topics: Blockchain, Security
Projects: Hyperledger Fabric

Kiva launches Africa’s first national decentralized ID system with Hyperledger Indy

Industry: Financial Services, Banking
Topics: Decentralized Identity, Self Sovereign ID, Digital Identity
Projects: Hyperledger Indy

Project Updates

The Hyperledger project landscape is a diverse grouping of distributed ledgers, tools and libraries. Six graduated Hyperledger Projects and 11 incubating Hyperledger Projects represent our project community as defined by our project lifecycle.

Hyperledger Project Landscape

The project lifecycle is governed by our Technical Steering Committee, which consists of 15 elected members of the technical contributor community. The responsibilities of the TSC are to steer the technical direction for Hyperledger. Each year, the Hyperledger technical community holds an election to select a new Technical Steering Committee (TSC) from the community at large. The main objective of the TSC is to drive technical governance for the projects and technologies hosted by the Hyperledger Foundation. The 2021-2022 TSC was elected in October and you can read more here. This year, the TSC is being led by Tracy Kuhrt, Associate Director, Blockchain and Multiparty Systems Architecture, Accenture (chair), and Danno Ferrin, Principal Software Engineer, Hedera (vice chair).

Each quarter all Hyperledger projects report to the TSC, and it is a great way for our community to understand how these projects are doing, what future work is being planned and how contributors can participate. Read our 2021 Updates here.

Some 2021 project highlights include:

In February 2021, Hyperledger Aries graduated to active status and joined Hyperledger Indy as “production ready” Hyperledger projects for decentralized identity. Hyperledger Aries provides reusable, interoperable tool kits designed for initiatives and solutions focused on creating, transmitting and storing verifiable digital credentials. Read more here.

This year, the Hyperledger Besu project community decided to switch its versioning to calendar versioning, known as CalVer, instead of the historic semantic versioning used by other Hyperledger projects. Some of the newest release features include the Flexible Privacy Group Performance tests and Mainnet Support Work, including preparing for the Berlin Network Upgrade and EIP-1559 support. Read more here.

Hyperledger Fabric v2.4.1 was released Dec 17th 2021. v2.2 is the current LTS release with patch releases quarterly. Hyperledger Fabric has stabilized with an LTS release process and incremental new features being added in minor releases. View all quarterly reports.

2021 brought us two new projects, Hyperledger Bevel and Hyperledger Firefly!

New Project: Hyperledger Bevel

Announcement Date: December 13, 2021

Hyperledger Bevel is an accelerator/tool that helps developers rapidly set up and deploy secure, scalable and production-ready DLT network(s) that also allows new organizations to be easily on-boarded on the network. Bevel, started as a Hyperledger Lab called Blockchain Automation Framework (BAF) and built a community of contributors during 2021. Learn more.

New Project: Hyperledger Firefly

Announcement Date: September 28, 2021

Hyperledger FireFly is a multi-party system for enterprise data flows. It provides a purpose-built system upon which to build decentralized blockchain applications. It solves for the layers of complexity that sit between the low level blockchain and high level business processes and user interfaces. FireFly enables developers to build blockchain apps for enterprises significantly faster by allowing them to focus on business logic instead of commodity infrastructure foundations. Learn more.

Innovations in our Hyperledger Labs

Hyperledger Foundation aims to help build communities by gathering people sharing a common interest in developing blockchain related software. Hyperledger Labs provides a space where work can easily be started without the creation of an official Hyperledger project. Hyperledger Labs have been not only a very active part of our community in 2021, but have nurtured new projects Hyperledger Bevel and Firefly as outlined above.

Today there are over 50 Hyperledger Labs that our community is working on including Minifabric: a Hyperledger Lab aimed at accelerating the move to production and YUI, one of the new Hyperledger Labs taking on cross-chain and off-chain operations.

The top 10 Most Active Labs by Pull Requests are as follows: (as of Nov 2021)

Blockchain-automation-framework (now Hyperledger Bevel)
business-partner-agent
orion (orion-server, orion-sdk-go)
solang
fabric-smart-client
perun (perun-*, go-perun)
fabric-token-sdk
weaver-dlt-interoperability
blockchain-carbon-accounting
fabric-operations-console

Hyperledger Events

Hyperledger Global Forum

While we all wanted to gather in person, like we did in March 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona (one of the last in-person events many of us attended), 2021 forced us to have Hyperledger Global Forum as a virtual event from June 8-10. The event was a success and feedback from the attendee survey was overwhelmingly positive: 97% would recommend this event to an industry friend.

We had a lot to celebrate as a community as we got together in June and as David Treat, Global Technology Incubation Lead and Global Blockchain Multiparty Systems Lead, at Accenture, said in this post leading up to the event, “In the year since we last saw each other, we’ve made immense progress in inventing new forms of money, re-platforming financial services infrastructure, rearchitecting supply chains into resilient and secure supply networks, and pursuing self-managed digital identity.”

The three day event was jam packed with presentations and panels from companies, developers and communities building with Hyperledger and had over 250 virtual speakers. Keynotes included HE Serey Chea, National Bank of Cambodia, Frank Yiannas, Deputy Commissioner FDA, a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder, Ethereum and more. Some highlights of sessions on CBDCs, programmable money and interoperability can be found in this two part post – Part I and Part II. And other recorded sessions, on topics like Climate Action, Supply Chains, NFTS and more.

A big thank you to our event sponsors and partners for HFG 2021 including: Accenture (Diamond and Diversity & Inclusion Sponsor), IBM (Diamond Sponsor), Filecoin Foundation (Platinum), Hitachi (Platinum), Siemens (Platinum), Zuellig Pharma (Platinum), AWS (Silver), BTP (Silver), Chainyard (Silver), ConsenSys (Silver), KrypC (Silver & Wellness), DTTC (Closed Captioning and Translation), Walmart Global Tech (Parent & Caregiver Support Program), Crypto Open Patent Alliance – COPA (Birds of Feather), Black Women Blockchain Council (Community), Diversity in Blockchain (Community), Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (Community), Greater Blockchain Business Council (Community), Kerala Blockchain Academy – KBA (Community), Trusted Blockchain Initiatives (Community), Blocknews (Media Partner), Cointelegraph China (Media Partner), CoinSpeaker (Media Partner), CrytoNewsZ (Media Partner), Forekast (Media Partner), Ledger Insights (Media Partner) and Tuoluo Finance (Media Partner).

WATCH THE HYPERLEDGER GLOBAL FORUM 2021 KEYNOTES AND SESSIONS

Hyperledger Member Summit

Hyperledger Member Summit 2021 The Hyperledger Member Summit took place online this year for the second consecutive year. Since virtual has lost its novelty, we streamlined the event to two half-day sessions to reach two regions. With 349 people registered, about 220 attendees across two regional programs, 11 sessions total, and 130+ companies represented, we had a strong showing for our second Hyperledger Member Summit in the Covid era. The overall feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from our members who attended.

Our Member Portal, once again served as a collaboration tool to document the activities and proposals coming out of the Summit. As a result, anyone that works at a member company can go back and review the recordings and SWOT output from each session throughout the year. Given the success of it last year, we brought back the China Community session to allow broader participation and inclusivity in our member community. In addition, interpreters allowed for our Chinese community to listen to the entirety of the event in Chinese.

We thank all our Hyperledger Member community members for their participation and contributions to this year’s Member Summit!

Hyperledger Member Webinars

Showing what is possible with Hyperledger technology is an important part of how the Hyperledger Foundation serves members and the community. One of the best ways to do that is to highlight what our member companies are building with different Hyperledger projects. Our Member Webinars is a series of hour-long sessions where Hyperledger members share learnings from their projects and try to answer all the hard questions about the opportunities and challenges of working with DLTs.

In 2021, our members contributed to 24 virtual webinars covering multiple projects, like Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu and Hyperledger Indy, across various use cases, including NFTs, DeFI, CyberSecurity and more.

CHECK OUT OUR WEBINAR LIBRARY (filter by Topic> Member Webinar) TO SEE WHAT MEMBERS ARE BUILDING

Community & Diversity

Our community is global and growing. Developing community at the local level, joining together to take on technical and industry challenges and creating pathways for developers to learn skills and build careers are all central to our work of fostering a thriving ecosystem around open source blockchain software technologies.

Our Hyperledger Meetup Community by the numbers in 2021:

Number of virtual meetups: 135 (A small number of in person events were also held in 2021, including the very first Hyperledger meetup in Rwanda! See video)
Number of participants at meetups: Over 5,000 attendees at virtual events
Number of languages used to host meetups: 12 (Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Portuguese, French, Urdu, Korean, English, Japanese, Hungarian, Chinese)
Number of people in Hyperledger meetup groups: over 81,000!

Many of our Meetups are live streamed/recorded and available on YouTube via our Meetup playlist. Some recent highlights from 2021 include:

Interoperability among Blockchains – Hyperledger Frankfurt – Dec 17th 2021
Hyperledger Tokyo Virtual Meetup – Hyperledger Tokyo – Nov 25th 2021
Atomic cross chain swap between Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum – Hyperledger Budapest – Nov 24th 2021
Hyperledger Fabric Deployment on AWS, IBM, and Oracle platforms – Hyperledger Washington, DC – Nov 11th 2021

Looking for other places to connect into the Hyperledger community? One of the highlights of 2021 has been the activity and contributions of our virtual global communities. Find a local or industry connection with our:

Regional Chapters: Hyperledger Regional Chapters are organized groups of community members in different parts of the world that are working together to address contribution barriers in their regions. We currently have chapters in Africa, Brazil, India, Italy, Japan and Latinoamerica. Check out our YouTube Regional chapter playlist for the latest event
Special Interest Groups – Hyperledger SIGs are communities focused on a particular industry sector or activity with a shared interest in advancing a common understanding of how blockchain technology in general, and Hyperledger technology in particular, may be applicable. Many of our SIGs are live streamed/recorded and then available on the SIG youtube playlist or on their wiki agenda pages

Special acknowledgment to our Chinese community, especially to our Technical Working Group China/超级账本中国技术工作组 (TWG China or TWGC), that is a bridge between the global Hyperledger community, and the emerging technical user and contributor community in China and the greater China region, including Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Training & Certification

As we recently wrote in our Staff Corner blog series, one of the biggest barriers to growth for the blockchain industry is the talent gap for developers with the right skills and training. Recognizing the coming demand, Hyperledger Foundation, in partnership with the Linux Foundation Training, has worked for years on developing a robust and growing set of enterprise blockchain training and certifications for developers.

We continued to enhance and offer more options for our community including:

In 2021, we updated our Blockchain Essentials courses that over 200,000 people have taken since its launch:

Blockchain: Understanding Its Uses and Implications – Enroll for Free

Understand exactly what a blockchain is, its impact and potential for change around the world, and analyze use cases in technology, business, and enterprise products and institutions

Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies – Enroll for Free

A primer to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Learn how to start building blockchain applications with Hyperledger frameworks.

New for 2021:

We also launched a new self-paced online course for Hyperledger Besu developers:

Hyperledger Besu Essentials: Creating a Private Blockchain Network – Enroll for Free

This course will provide a learner with insight into how to create a private blockchain network or to connect to Ethereum mainnet and use Hyperledger Besu to do these activities, and provide examples of where Hyperledger Besu is being used.

We announced Hyperledger Indy and Aires Workshops for Q1 2022 that complement our free online existing course: Introduction to Hyperledger Sovereign Identity Blockchain Solutions: Indy, Aries & Ursa and Becoming and Aries Developer.

Our Hyperledger Fabric Developer and Administrator Certifications were also updated in 2021 and are becoming core requirements for Hyperledger Fabric engineers.

And, last but not least, we know that blockchain technology needs to be taught and understood at the executive level across all industries so in 2021 we partnered with Wharton Wharton Executive Education on their 2022 “The Economics of Blockchain and Digital Assets” online certification. Our Hyperledger community contributed to the course work and hosted a webinar to share more information about this program. The curriculum includes case studies on deployments by two Hyperledger Foundation members:

Soramitsu’s Bank of Bakong CBDC project, built using Hyperledger Iroha
Poste Italiane’s new generation of digital identity services, which is powered by Hyperledger Besu

Mentoring

2021 Mentorship Program. This year we sponsored 21 mentorships- The Hyperledger Mentorship Program is a structured hands-on learning opportunity for new developers who may otherwise lack the opportunity to gain exposure to Hyperledger open source development and entry to the technical community.

Check out these Mentorship Spotlights that highlight the work done by the Mentors and the Mentees as part of their program participation.

Hyperledger Ecosystem Expansion at the Linux Foundation

2021 was also the year that Hyperledger technologies made their way again across to other Linux Foundation open source projects some examples:

openIDL – The Open Insurance Data Link platform and project built with Hyperledger Fabric formally launched on April 12th with major insurance carriers like Hanover, The Hartford and Travelers in partnership with AAIS. The platform aims to reduce the cost of regulatory reporting for insurance carriers, provide a standardized data repository for analytics and a connection point for third parties to deliver new applications to members. As of December, US insurance state regulators from Mississippi, Virginia, Main and Connecticut are members of openIDL and actively participating in the open source project.
LF Public Health – Launched the Cardea project built on the Hyperledger technology. Cardea is a complete ecosystem for the exchange of privacy-preserving digital health credentials, open sourced by Indicio.tech as a project in LFPH.

Wow, you made it to the end of 2021 year in review post. Congrats! But this is only the start of great things our community will be building and delivering in 2022 and beyond.

Join Us in 2022!

Nov 10

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Staff Corner: The Importance of Executive Education in Driving Enterprise Blockchain Growth

By Executive Director at Hyperledger Foundation and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation Blog, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner

One of the biggest barriers to growth for the blockchain industry is the talent gap for developers with the right skills and training. Recognizing the coming demand, Hyperledger Foundation, in partnership with the Linux Foundation Training, has worked for years on developing a robust and growing set of enterprise blockchain training and certifications for developers.

*Daniela Barbosa, Hyperledger Foundation Executive Director*

The classes range from a series of free “Blockchain Basics,” which aim to help professionals learn, explore, and evaluate how blockchain technologies can help them meet their professional goals, to a series of professional developer and administrator training courses and certifications.

Over 200,000 people have taken the free courses, which include introductions to blockchain use cases and Hyperledger technologies in general as well as classes focused on Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Aries and, added most recently, Hyperledger Besu. The advanced classes are for professionals looking to master Hyperledger blockchain technologies, especially Hyperledger Fabric. Completing these classes are a stepping stone passing the exams to become a Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator or a Certified Hyperledger Fabric Developer. The classes and the certification exams are available in both English and Japanese.

Companies looking to expand the skill set of their developer teams can also turn to the network of Hyperledger Training Partners. Individuals who want to add to their resumes can dive into our community as contributors. The Hyperledger Learning Materials Development Working Group is a good starting point for those looking to get involved. Books like the recently released Hands-On Smart Contract Development with Hyperledger Fabric V2: Building Enterprise Blockchain Applications published by O’Reilly can be a valuable leg up as well.

However, as the recent Hyperledger Brand Survey highlighted, the mainstream adoption of blockchain by enterprises also requires training that specifically serves business leaders. Blockchain technologies are driving new business models, reshaping industries and changing the flow of information and money around the world. C-level executives and senior management need to become fluent in the technology to define and redefine their businesses. Hyperledger Foundation is as committed to advancing executive education as it is to developer training.

We are kicking off our efforts to partner with top educators on content targeted to business leaders by sponsoring the Wharton Executive Education “The Economics of Blockchain and Digital Assets” online certification. Our Hyperledger community is also contributing to the course work. The curriculum includes case studies on deployments by two Hyperledger Foundation members:

Soramitsu’s Bank of Bakong CBDC project, built using Hyperledger Iroha
Poste Italiane’s new generation of digital identity services, which is powered by Hyperledger Besu

To learn more, please join my Fireside Chat on Nov. 17th 11am ET with Dr. Cathy Barrera, Blockchain Program Director, The Wharton School, as well as James Edwards from Soramitsu and Emiliano Vernini from Poste Italiane. We will be discussing the business drivers, requirements and results from these two case studies in a preview of the type of content this program will feature.

If you have other ideas on how Hyperledger Foundation can provide training and learning opportunities, please reach out to marketing@hyperledger.org

Watch Recorded Fireside Session

Oct 27

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Staff Corner: Introducing Hyperledger Foundation

By Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger Foundation and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation Blog, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner

I am excited to announce that Hyperledger is now Hyperledger Foundation. As our ecosystem and community grow, we need a clear identity for our organization that arches over all our projects, labs, regional chapters, working groups, special interest groups and overall collective effort to advance enterprise blockchain technology. The Hyperledger Foundation brand offers that clarity. It also positions us to fulfill our newly updated mission to foster and coordinate the premiere open source enterprise blockchain community.

I’m sharing this news in the first of a new series, Hyperledger Foundation Staff Corner. Our team members will be rotating through here with their take on a variety of topics. Today, I am offering mine on what the Hyperledger Foundation brand means to me. And it boils down to three words: Open. Global. Trusted.

These words surfaced as major attributes respondents associated with Hyperledger via the Brand Awareness Study conducted earlier this year by Linux Foundation Research. When I thought deeply about our mission, why we exist and why we matter, I honestly couldn’t think of three better words to describe the Hyperledger Foundation. They have become our brand tenets.

We are open.
Being open is core to what we do. We’re here to lead an open, global and welcoming enterprise blockchain ecosystem—a community where no contribution is seen as too small or insignificant. A neutral, even playing field for all—where everyone can be innovative without worrying about politics or competition.

Without open source, we would not have been able to facilitate the development of the industry’s best enterprise blockchain technologies and tools. Beyond the code, we take transparency seriously at both the Hyperledger and Linux Foundations. Hyperledger Foundation’s open, collaborative approach ensures the transparency and infrastructure needed to ensure a thriving and stable ecosystem around open source enterprise blockchain projects. You join Hyperledger Foundation with the intention of helping to foster a new way of conducting business—one that places trust and transparency at the forefront—that is ultimately better for everyone involved and even better for the world.

We are global.
Hyperledger is so much more than the sum of its projects and code. Yes, the code is a crucial component, and I cannot thank Brian Behlendorf, the former Executive Director, enough for his work in code development across this vast community. But this community is so much more: It’s made up of organizations, developers, executives, students, teachers, mothers, fathers, liberals, conservatives. It’s supported by the Technical Steering Committee, various working groups, special interest groups and Meetup communities all across the globe. It’s a community of communities. One that I’ve been lucky enough to witness firsthand grow, evolve, and transform over the last four years. One that I get the pleasure of taking to the next chapter – creating and defining new markets.

We are trusted.
Trust is the deciding factor in whether a society can function. Without trust, the system fails. Blockchain technologies are enabling a new era of trusted collaboration that is fundamentally transforming business transactions across new and existing markets. Hyperledger technologies are increasingly at play in true enterprise multiparty systems that are redefining information sharing and transactions for many leading organizations. In fact, more than half of the companies on the Forbes Blockchain 50, including companies like Baidu, DTTC, Oracle, Samsung, Swisscom, Telefonica, Visa and Walmart, use or have built solutions powered by Hyperledger Foundation technologies.

Why Hyperledger Foundation.
Response to the brand survey by Linux Foundation Research showed that we need a clearer line between Hyperledger as an organization and the individual Hyperledger projects. More than half responded that we should add Foundation to our name. This community input was the critical final impetus to convene a task force to update our mission as well as rebrand as Hyperledger Foundation.

My staff and I have seen the hard work that all of the individual parts and players have dedicated to this Foundation. They’ve volunteered their time and there is no greater asset than time. I’m a big believer that there is a right time and place for everything. This is the right time, this is the right place, to make this move and rebrand as a Foundation.

Hyperledger Foundation is an important and meaningful step in our evolution. I hope you join us for the ride. Learn about Hyperledger Foundation membership and all the other ways you can get involved.