Hyperledger (Linux Foundation)

Basics

• The project was launched in December 2015 with Linux foundation at the helm of affairs and its flagship blockchain based software solution Hyperledger Fabric was released in July 2017.
• Not a company. Not a cryptocurrency. Not a blockchain. Hyperledger is rather something like a hub for open industrial blockchain development. On its website Hyperledger explains:
• "The consortium has 259 general members (B9lab is one of them) from all across the business spectrum & 18 Premier members which include Baidu, JP Morgan, Intel, AMEX, SAP among others. IBM is working on multiple blockchain projects across the globe with major industry players & governments which gives it a unique position. On the downside, Fabric does not have the capability of adding digital tokens or Cryptocurrencies to its platform & it is also a little too dependent on IBM."
• “Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing, and Technology.”

• Wikipedia: “Hyperledger (or the Hyperledger project) is a cross-industry collaborative effort, started in December 2015 by the Linux Foundation, to support blockchain-based distributed ledgers. It is focused on ledgers designed to support global business transactions, including major technological, financial, and supply chain companies, with the goal of improving many aspects of performance and reliability. The project aims to bring together a number of independent efforts to develop open protocols and standards, by providing a modular framework that supports different components for different uses. This would include a variety of blockchains with their own consensus and storage models, and services for identity, access control, and contracts.”

• “One of the first proposals was for a codebase combining previous work by Digital Asset Holdings, Blockstream's libconsensus, and IBM's OpenBlockchain. This was later named Fabric. In May, Intel's distributed ledger, named Sawtooth, was also incubated.”

• According to Preston Byrne's own website:

"Previously, I was a securitization and derivatives lawyer with the London offices of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and Norton Rose Fulbright, and after BigLaw, co-founder and COO of Monax. Monax built the first permissioned blockchain client in 2014. The design has since evolved into the market-leading Hyperledger Burrow permissioned Ethereum blockchain node. Burrow is presently the Hyperledger Project’s only Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and is used by Intel and IBM’s contributions to that project, respectively named Sawtooth Lake and Fabric, to run EVMs on those codebases."

Projects or 'Frameworks' of Hyperledger:

• Hyperledger Aries: directed toward increasing blockchain-to-blockchain communications
• Hyperledger Besu: "aimed to provide a platform for “open development and deployment,” marks the first public blockchain-compatible submission to Hyperledger"
• Hyperledger Burrow: This project develops a permissible smart contract machine along the specification of Ethereum.
• Hyperledger Gridwork:
• Hyperledger Fabric: This project is lead by IBM. Fabric is a plug and plays implementation of blockchain technology designed as a foundation to develop high-scaling blockchain applications with a flexible degree of permissions. Permissioned with channel support.
• Hyperledger Indy: decentralized identity
• Hyperledger Iroha: Iroha is a project of a couple of Japanese companies to create an easy to incorporate the framework for a blockchain. Mobile application focus.
• Hyperledger Sawtooth: This is a modular blockchain suite developed by Intel, which uses a new consensus algorithm called Proof of Elapsed Time (PoeT). Permissioned & permissionless support, EVM transaction family.
• Hyperledger Quilt:
• Some companies have announced that they would build on Hyperledger, but not specified on which framework. These include Daimler, General Electric

Hyperledger Aries

• Hyperledger has announced the release of a set of blockchain interoperability tools including an interface, wallet, messaging system, API, among others. Dubbed Hyperledger Aries, the rollout is directed toward increasing blockchain-to-blockchain communications.

Hyperledger Avalon

• From this announcement (3-10-2019):

"Hyperledger Avalon is born from Trusted Compute Framework (TCF) which is a ledger independent implementation of the Trusted Compute Specifications published by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Hyperledger Avalon is resulted from great collaborations of Hyperledger, EEA, and cloud service provider ecosystems and is one of the most broadly sponsored projects to date, it brings together sponsorship from Intel, iExec Blockchain Tech, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, BGI, Chainlink, Consensys, EEA, Espeo, IBM, Kaleido, Microsoft, Banco Santander, WiPro, Oracle, and Monax."

Hyperledger Besu

• Fka Pantheon but submitted (29-8-2019) to Hyperledger as the Hyperledger Besu project.
• Client for Ethereum built by PegaSys
• The Pantheon team is also interested in finding “cross-chain opportunities” with Tendermint, Burrow’s consensus algorithm, and in collaborating with Hyperledger Quilt because of its interledger protocol.
• "Pantheon is an Apache 2.0 licensed Ethereum client written in Java. Pantheon is public chain compatible, with a more modular architecture and roadmap to add privacy, permissioning, and new consensus algorithms."

"Pantheon was written with the singular focus of getting enterprise Ethereum implementations to production. The Java client seeks to be an extension of Quorum and represents a major milestone in enterprise Ethereum for multiple reasons.

First, Pantheon has been released under a more enterprise-friendly license, Apache 2.0, which allows enterprises greater ownership over the software they develop. Secondly, Pantheon is a java client, a programming language that brings with it an estimated 10 million developers and a host of technicaladvantages for enterprise implementations of Ethereum, from it’s pluggable architecture and plethora of libraries to valuable monitoring and infrastructure tools.

But perhaps most interesting with far-reaching effects is that Pantheon allows users to run nodes within a private, enterprise network as well as nodes that can connect to the Ethereum mainnet. This ability to bridge to the mainnet has huge potential; in the words of the PegaSys team, it allows private networks to “seek compatibility with the powerful network effects Mainnet applications will be able to offer.” This also opens contribution to the protocol layer from a plethora of knowledgeable developers."

• Palm; an NFT ecosystem (31-3-2021) will be built with this tech.
• Brazil continues to move forward with its plan of delivering a working version of its own central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital real, for the end of 2024. According to reports, the central bank of the country chose Hyperledger Besu (10-3-2023).

Hyperledger Burrow

• This project develops a permissible smart contract machine along the specification of Ethereum.
• Is being used/built upon by IBM
• According to Preston Byrne's own website:

"Previously, I was a securitization and derivatives lawyer with the London offices of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and Norton Rose Fulbright, and after BigLaw, co-founder and COO of Monax. Monax built the first permissioned blockchain client in 2014. The design has since evolved into the market-leading Hyperledger Burrow permissioned Ethereum blockchain node. Burrow is presently the Hyperledger Project’s only Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and is used by Intel and IBM’s contributions to that project, respectively named Sawtooth Lake and Fabric, to run EVMs on those codebases."

• From a Cosmos blog (25-9-2022):

"In the second half of 2015, discussions between Jae and Eris Industries over copyright of the Tendermint codebase (which included an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine), led Jae to introduce an abstraction between the Tendermint consensus engine and the application state machine it replicates, a programming interface we now know as the Application Blockchain Interface (ABCI). This interface made it possible for application logic to be completely separated from the Tendermint consensus engine, to be run in a different process, and even written in a different programming language, making Tendermint the general purpose state-machine replication engine it has become today. This allowed the components related to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and to any cryptocurrency elements at all, to be refactored out of the Tendermint code base. In particular, at the time, ownership over the Ethereum Virtual Machine components moved to Eris Industries, and that code evolved into what is now the Hyperledger Burrow Project."

Hyperledger Fabric

Basics

• For IBM Fabric serves as a flagship project for blockchain development. The IT giant uses Fabric for a variety of its own projects and for collaborations with several business partners.
• Recently joined forces with major blockchain Ethereum.

Tech

• Rather than a single blockchain Fabric is a base for the development of blockchain based solutions with a modular architecture. With Fabric different components of Blockchains, like consensus and membership services can become plug-and-play. Fabric is designed to provide a framework with which enterprises can put together their own, individual blockchain network that can quickly scale to more than 1,000 transactions per second.
• The framework is implemented in Go. It is made for enabling consortium blockchains with different degrees of permissions. Fabric heavily relies on a smart contract system called Chaincode, which every peer of the networks runs in Docker containers. An overview of Fabric’s technology can be found in the manual.
• While not completely and generally permissioned, Fabric allows enterprises to make parts of the blockchain, if not all, permissioned. Participants usually need to register to get the permission to join and issue transactions on a Fabric based blockchain.  To use resources more efficiently, Fabric has fewer nodes than a public chain and computes data massively in parallel, which makes Fabric scale much better than public blockchains. Also its basic architecture supports confidential data, giving its members more privacy as they find on a public blockchain.
• Maybe most important is the separation between so-called “Endorsers” and “Consensus Nodes”. If you are familiar with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin you will recognize the separation between miners and nodes. The Endorsers have the state, and build, validate and propagate transactions and chaincode, while the Consensus Nodes orders the already validated transactions. While this separation has not been a concept of the first blockchain concept of Satoshi Nakamoto, but became an unwished reality in most cryptocurrencies, Fabric is one of the first to make this separation a design principle. This enables Fabric for example to implement a better division of labour, so that not every peer of the network has to do every job.
• While having no native currency, Fabric allows the user to define assets from client side and use them with the Fabric Composer. Fabric’s Chaincode Smart Contracts framework is similar to Ethereum: Chaincode defines the business logic of assets, the rules for reading and altering the so called state of the assets. Like Ethereum Fabric maintains not a set of unspent outputs, as Bitcoin maintains, but the state of the blockchain which is not restricted to transactional data.
• Other than the public blockchains of cryptocurrencies Fabric allows participants to build a separate channel for their assets and hence isolate and segregate transactions and a ledger. With this method, the chaincode needed to read and alter the state of an asset will only be installed on peers involved in this certain business case. Like in good chat programs Fabric’s blockchains allow the user to participate in both open and private interactions.
• Beyond this IBM proposes an alternative design for public and permissionless blockchains. Fabric uses a public key infrastructure to generate cryptographic certificates tied to organizations and users. So it is possible to restrict data and channel access to certain actors.
• Fabric’s strength seems to be the high grade of flexibility in permission and privacy while enabling high scalability through a more advanced division of labour of network participants.

Companies that will build/use Fabric

• Allianz
• Amazon
• Ant Financial
• Anthem
• Baidu
• BBVA
• BNP Paribas
• Broadbridge
• China Construction Bank (second-largest bank in the world. 19-2-2020)
• Comcast
• eTrade Connect
• Figure
• Hewlett Packard Enteprise
• Honeywell (19-2-2020)
• HSBC (19-2-2020)
• ING
• Intel
• Maersk (2-2-2021) TradeLens.
• Microsoft
• Nasdaq
• Nestle (19-2-2020)
• Northern Trust
• PNC Bank
• Santander
• SAP
• Seagate
• Siemens
• StateFarm
• Tencent (19-2-2020)
• T-Mobile (19-2-2020)
• UBS
• VISA
• Walmart

Hyperledger Grid

• Cargill

Hyperledger Indy

• Decentralized identity.
• CVS Health and ING have said it will use/built on top of it.

Hyperledger Iroha

• Iroha is a project of a couple of Japanese companies to create an easy to incorporate the framework for a blockchain.
• Mobile application focus.

Hyperledger Sawtooth

Basics

• This is a modular blockchain suite developed by Intel, which uses a new consensus algorithm called Proof of Elapsed Time (PoeT). Permissioned & permissionless support, EVM transaction family.

Companies who will use/build on it

• CVSHealth
• Intel
• Cargill
• T-Mobile (19-2-2020)

Hyperledger 'Tools'

• Calipher: Blockchain framework benchmark platform
• Cello: As-a-service deployment
• Composer: Model and build blockchain networks
• Explorer: View and explore data on the blockchain
• Quilt: Ledger interoperability

Team, members, etc.

Team

• Behlendorf, Brian; Executive Director. “a technologist, executive, computer programmer, and an important figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as President of the Foundation for three years. Behlendorf has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003”
• Brown, Richard; Technical Steering Committee
• Masters, Blythe; governing board chair
• Joseph Lubin; on the governing board (11-9-2019)
• McDonald, Todd; governing chair
• Centrality claims their team members come from (10-4-2020) all kinds of big organisations, one of which is Alibaba.

Members

• 270 partners in the consortium (6-2019)
• Multiple JPMorgan connections
• Early members of the initiative include blockchain-specific companies (Blockchain, ConsenSys, R3), other technology companies (Cisco, Digital Asset Holdings, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, NTT DATA, Red Hat, VMware), financial companies (ABN AMRO, ANZ Bank, BNY Mellon, CLS Group, CME Group, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Deutsche Börse Group, J.P. Morgan, State Street, SWIFT, Wells Fargo), and others (Accenture, Calastone, Credits, Guardtime, IntellectEU, Nxt Foundation, Symbiont).
• Members since then: March 29, 2016: Blockstream, Bloq, eVue Digital Labs, Gem, itBit, Milligan Partners, Montran Labs, Ribbit.me, Tequa Creek Holdings, and Thomson Reuters.
• May 19, 2016: Beijing AiYi Digital Finance, Broadridge, Cloudsoft, Coinplug, Cuscal, Eurostep Holdings, Soramitsu, and Skry.
• Other members: Blockchain, BBVA, Blocko, Bitse, Bitmark, Belict, Botuzongheng, Altoros, Aesthetic Integration, BNP Paribas, Bubi.cn, CA Technologies, Calastone, Chain Connected, JBI, China Merchants Bank, Colu, Consensus Base, Airbus, American Express, DTCC, Daimler, SAP, Wanda FFAN Technology, Energy Blockchain Labs, Factom, Gem, PeerSafe, 33.cn, Hashed Health, Huawei, Hundsun, Hyperchain, Intuit, Inveshare, Ircotech, Kaiser Permanente, KSD, Koscom, Kubique, LedgerDomain, Libra, Loyyal, Lykke, MadHive, Milligan Partners, Miracl, Monax, MonetaGo, ML, Moscow Exchange, Murphy & McGonigle, NSE, NEC, Netki, NEX, Nokia, Norbloc, NTTData, Onchain, Orange Magic Cube, Paxos, PDX, RadarWin, Redhat, Samsung, Sany, SBerbank, SecureKey, GingkCo, SG, Nexgo, Dianrong, Swisscom, Symbiont, Tai, TMX, UMF, VMWare, Yunphant, WutongTree, BoaQuan, Chamber of Digital Commerce, CSA, Colored Coins, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, IC3, Investrata Foundation, Oscre, Sovrin, Blockchain Research Institute, Inoit, VSP, Quant
• Hyperlegder has added eight new members including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Russian metal giant Nornickel to its consortium; Nornickel is planning to tokenize its mining volume by years end using on Hyperledger.
• Hyperledger onboarded 12 new members, including Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of the eponymous e-commerce giant; financial services firm Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom, one of the largest telecoms providers in Europe; and European blockchain trading platform we.trade, among others.
• Announced (8-3-2020) eight new members, notably Clear, Conduent and Walmart. Other new members are Aiou Technology, Joisto Group, Tangem, and Tokenation.
• Part of The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance and in 6-2019 the EEA also joined Hyperledger as an associate member.
• Member of Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI)