There are four significant announcements relating to the Hyperledger community for open source blockchain projects. Today is the launch of the Linux Foundation (LF) Decentralized Trust, the new umbrella body for blockchain (Hyperledger), decentralized cryptography solutions, identity and more. Hedera Hashgraph announced it is transferring across its codebase, including the Hashgraph Consensus mechanism. Plus, there are 13 new LF Decentralized Trust members such as Hashgraph, Banco Central do Brasil, Polygon and Tata Consulting Services (TCS). Finally, Hyperledger Fabric, the blockchain that formed the initial foundation of the community, has now released version 3.0.
The launch of the LF Decentralized Trust has been planned for months. As blockchain becomes more mature, adjacent technologies are in demand, including Zero Knowledge Proofs for privacy, other cryptography, interoperability and identity. Hence, the Trust over IP Foundation for identity as well as the Hyperledger Foundation are now both part of the LF Decentralized Trust.
Banco Central do Brasil leads new members
Thirteen additional members are joining, headlined by Banco Central do Brasil, responsible for the DREX wholesale CBDC solution which is leading the way for tokenization more broadly. DREX has been delayed as it explores privacy solutions. One of the privacy options it’s looking into is Rayls, which supports institutions creating their own permissioned Ethereum compatible subnet blockchains with secure bridges. The Rayls Foundation is another new member.
Other new members we’ve written about regularly include:
- Ownera, which provides the FinP2P routing network to enable interoperability between different tokenization platforms;
- Tata Consulting Services (TCS), the major provider to the banking sector and beyond;
- Polygon, best known for the Polygon Proof of Stake network but with has an expanding array of technology options.
Additionally, they are joined by AYANWORKS, Dhiway, Dfns, Exponential Science Foundation, Print2Block, SERPRO and Wanchain.
Last but not least, Hedera becomes a founding Premier Member.
Hedera commits its code
Hedera Hashgraph is one of the few public DLTs that remains permissioned with Hedera Council members operating the validator nodes with ‘write’ permissions. The Council includes 31 major corporates, such as IBM, Google, Boeing, Nomura, Worldpay and more. Of course, that doesn’t stop users from deploying smart contracts and tokens on the DLT in a permissionless manner. It simply prevents hard forks and means issues could get corrected if anything went badly wrong. There are plans to become more decentralized in the future.
In 2022 the Governing Council voted to acquire the proprietary Hashgraph Consensus code developed by Leemon Baird at Swirlds. That along with other open source Hedera code is now being contributed to the LF Decentralized Trust.
“By contributing our codebase to LF Decentralized Trust, as project Hiero, we are reaffirming our commitment to open governance and collaboration. LF Decentralized Trust’s mission to advance decentralized systems aligns perfectly with our own goals,” said Charles Adkins, President of Hedera Hashgraph LLC.
He emphasized that the governance of the source code is now with the LF Decentralized Trust ecosystem, but the network is still managed by the Hedera Council.
With all these changes, the LF Decentralized Trust is now in a position to move forward at speed as tokenization prepares to go mainstream.
