This 20min video was published by The Linux Foundation in early 2017 as a keynote address by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger Project, formally introducing the project.
The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry, open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally. The Project is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and implements many open source best practices familiar to other leading projects.
HYPERLEDGER PROJECT GOALS
The goals of the project are delineated as such:
Build an open source, developer-focused community of communities to benefit an ecosystem of Hyperledger-based solution providers and users, focused on blockchain-related use cases that will work across a variety of industry sectors.
Through this, create a family of enterprise grade, open source blockchain frameworks, platforms and libraries, upon which anyone can build and run their own applications to meet real business needs.
Involve developers, service providers, solution providers and end users in the development and promotion of the software, using the best practices of multi-stakeholder open source community.
Host the collaboration environment for the community, establishing a neutral home for community infrastructure and technical governance of Hyperledger.
MANY BLOCKCHAINS
There will not be only one blockchain or a chain-of-all-chains.
There will be many public chains and millions of private chains, potentially each with a different consensus mechanisms, preferred smart contract language/mechanism and other characteristics.
The more common code underlying these chains, the better for everyone.
This is still early days – perhaps like 1994 and the web.
COMMUNITY OF MULTIPLE COMMUNITIES
The idea of Hyperledger is modeled after the Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation projects.
A Hyperledger project involves:
- A team of volunteer developers
- Building code in the open
- Managing their own roadmap and release schedule
- Responsible for following HL policies and requirements
- Encouraged but not required to align their code with other projects
Across projects, we have:
- Common software license
- Common IP Framework
- Common collaboration tools
- Promotion and branding as an equal to other projects
- Security processes and practices
TWO FLAGSHIP PROJECTS
Fabric: Uses Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, which was originally developed by IBM, who contributed to this project along with Digital Asset others.
Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture, Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system.
Sawtooth Lake: Like of Proof of work without requiring the same processing power. Hyperledger Sawtooth is a modular platform for building, deploying, and running distributed ledgers. Distributed ledgers provide a digital record (such as asset ownership) that is maintained without a central authority or implementation.
About Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf is a technology adviser and entrepreneur who has held founding and executive board positions in firms and non-profits focused on open systems, open standards and open source. Behlendorf organized and served as the Founding President of the Apache Software Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit that organizes volunteer software development projects around key Internet technologies, helping ensure an open and free marketplace. Behlendorf also founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of CollabNet, a company focused on bringing open source collaborative software development tools and methodologies into enterprise environments. Behlendorf currently serves on the Board of the Mozilla Foundation, the single largest open source project by user base, revenue and funded core headcount. Since retiring as Chief Technology Officer of CollabNet in 2007, he has focused on advising corporations, start-ups, investors, governments and NGOs on open source strategies.