Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 160

At the end of 2015, the Linux Foundation formed the Hyperledger project to develop an enterprise-grade and open-source distributed ledger framework. They hoped to focus the blockchain community on building robust, industry-specific applications, platforms, and hardware systems to support businesses.

The Linux Foundation saw that many different groups were building blockchain technology without a cohesive direction. The industry was duplicating effort, and the tribalism was leading teams to solve the same problem twice. The foundation members saw similarities between the birth of the Internet and the emergence of blockchain technology: If blockchain was going to realize its fullest potential, an open-source and collaborative development strategy was desperately needed.

The Hyperledger project is led by Executive Director Brian Behlendorf, who has decades of experience dating back to the original Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation, as well as being a chief technology officer (CTO) of the World Economic Forum. So, it’s not surprising that Hyperledger has been well received. Many of the top business and industry leaders have joined the project, including Accenture, Visa, Fujitsu Limited, IBM, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft. It has also attracted many of the top blockchain organizations.

Hyperledger’s technical steering committees ensure robustness and interoperability between these different technologies. The hope is that the cross-industry, open-source collaboration will advance blockchain technology and deliver billions of dollars in economic value by sharing the costs of research and development across many organizations.

Hyperledger is identifying and addressing the critical features and requirements missing from the blockchain technology ecosystem. It’s also fostering a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers and holding open space for developers to contribute to building better blockchain systems.

Hyperledger has a project life cycle similar to that of the Linux Foundation. A proposal is submitted, and then the accepted proposal is brought into incubation. When a project has reached a stable state, it graduates and is moved into an active state. Each of the projects were initially led by a large corporation or start-up, and since then, many of them have created strategic partnerships to share in the project’s development. For example, Fabric was led by IBM, Sawtooth by Intel, and Iroha by Soramitsu, but now many additional partnerships have helped advance each project.

Hyperledger, like many open-source projects, uses GitHub (www.github.com/hyperledger) and a chat service (https://chat.hyperledger.org) to connect with teams working on each of the projects. These are great places to get the latest updates and to check on the progress that these projects are making in development.