Hyperledger: Everything you need to know about it

Hyperledger is a project started by the Linux Foundation in 2015 which aims to increase the level of collaboration on open-source blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Their website, and corresponding github, boasts an ever-growing “greenhouse” of business blockchain frameworks & tools, the latter of which is used in concert with the former to increase the ease of creating networks. Overall, the project is focused primarily on transactions throughout supply chain management, finance, and technology.

Some of the member organizations include blockchain software vendors, technology platform companies, financial services firms, business software companies such as SAP, academic institutions, systems integrators, and other tangentially related players. Member organizations introduce the use cases and repositories which result in frameworks groomed through small decentralized development teams.

Although this seems like a foray into blockchain as a finance medium, Brian Behlendorf – the executive director of the effort – has stated that the Hyperledger project will never build its own cryptocurrency. Further, the sub-projects have been granted some major industry traction. The London Stock Exchange Group partnered with IBM in 2017 to create a blockchain which issues shares of Italian companies, through Hyperledger Fabric. In the same year, Oracle produced their Blockchain Cloud Service, and the Royal Bank of Canada has begun using Hyperledger to perform settlement of interbank transactions from the United States.

The frameworks – Burrow, Fabric, Grid, Iroha, Sawtooth, and Indy – are each focused on providing permissioned support for building mobile applications, supply channels, favouring the Ethereum Virtual Machine for the transaction family. This means that ERC20 token interoperability is available out-of-the-box. Further, the tools – Caliper, Cello, Composer, Explorer, Quilt, and Ursa – provide benchmarking, visualization, and cryptography facilities for people who are charged with maintaining implementations of the frameworks.

If you are a developer, you can get involved by joining the community through their mailing list, and subscribing to their calendar updates for each sub-project. Please stay tuned for follow-up articles about each of the frameworks and code examples!

E. Levi Allen is a Hyperledger certified software engineer, musician, and crypto-enthusiast. Follow him on twitter @cryptocaveat.