By Matt Hussey
5 min read
Not all blockchain projects are created equal. While we’ve seen a whole host of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects, Hyperledger is a bit different. It’s not a cryptocurrency, or a company, or a type of blockchain.
Rather, it’s a collaborative melting pot for some of the world’s biggest companies looking to explore blockchain-based solutions to big problems.
Hyperledger is a project hosted by the Linux Foundation to help developers and companies work together to build collaborative blockchain projects. It’s a collective of open-source blockchains and tools that anyone can use to create their own distributed ledgers.
The idea is to create cross-industry collaboration, allowing blockchain-based projects to interact. By comparison, the ledgers at the heart of most cryptocurrencies cannot interact with each other.
Like Linux’s operating system, Hyperledger is open-source, allowing others to freely build on top of it. This has lead to a flurry of different projects from some of the world’s biggest companies.
Early on in the project’s development, people wondered if Hyperledger should have its own coin. However, the executive director of the project said, “You’ll never see a Hyperledger coin. By not pushing a currency, we avoid so many political challenges of having to maintain a globally consistent currency.”
The Linux foundation first announced the platform in December 2015.
There are more than 240 organizations actively supporting Hyperledger's development. It’s a very different approach from how most blockchain products have been built up until now.
Among those organizations are big tech businesses like Fujitsu, Huawei and Samsung as well as financial institutions like American Express and J.P. Morgan.
On top of that, the Linux Foundation has created a whole suite of free tools alongside Hyperledger to help others.
Hyperledger has its own charter laying out the direction of the project. “Create an enterprise-grade, open-source distributed ledger framework and code base.”
Hyperledger's aim is to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of different businesses—so it's modular in its design. That allows different teams to take different approaches.
At present, there is a range of different consensus protocols being used on Hyperledger projects. Teams can bolt together and build their own custom blockchains using the tools provided.
This is a very different approach to the consensus approach of networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin which have to get the whole community to agree on changes.
Some 159 engineers from 27 organizations contributed to the design and development of Hyperledger Fabric v1.0.
Thanks to its modular design, there's an array of projects and businesses using Hyperledger for different purposes.
The Hyperledger project has attracted dozens of developers and community members to its open-source approach to blockchain; at 2020's Global Forum alone it announced 14 new members and service providers, including retail giant Walmart.
It demonstrates how many companies see a blockchain-based future and are working together to make it a reality.
But it does have its challenges. There is competition for enterprise-level blockchain solutions, from the likes of R3, EOS and Ethereum; though Hyperledger appears to be holding its own; in January 2020, Hyperledger Fabric overtook R3 Corda in developer activity.
Time will tell if Hyperledger's open-sourced approach will bring blockchain to the world.
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