Hyperledger Foundation Announces Development Milestones for Three Projects; Plans for Hyperledger Global Forum

Will Host Global Community, Spotlight Technology and Adoption Advancements and Foster New Development at September Event in Dublin, Ireland

SAN FRANCISCO (May 19, 2022) – Hyperledger Foundation, the open, global ecosystem for enterprise blockchain technologies, today announced development milestones for three of its projects, including the release of a long term support (LTS) preview version of Hyperledger Iroha 2. Additionally, Hyperledger Foundation, which is hosted at the Linux Foundation, released details for this year’s Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF), the largest annual gathering of the global Hyperledger community. 

Hyperledger Foundation currently hosts 14 active projects, including six graduated and eight incubating ones. They include five distributed ledgers, which are all graduated projects, as well as five tools and three libraries. Hyperledger Iroha, a graduated distributed ledger, is marching towards a full V2 release. The community has been introducing a steady stream of releases for the new version and, now, is releasing a LTS preview version to ramp up adoption. Hyperledger Cactus, and Hyperledger FireFly, both incubating tools, each recently launched their V1.0 releases as well.

The fast growing and maturing Hyperledger project landscape will be a main focus of Hyperledger Global Forum 2022, which will take place September 12-13 in Dublin, Ireland, at Convention Centre Dublin. HGF will have dual technology and business tracks and workshops where more than 100 speakers will be sharing the latest on developments from Hyperledger projects, labs, working groups and special interest groups and deployments as well as academic research, emerging business and use cases ranging from Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) to the climate, supply chains to security, and digital identities to NFTs. David Treat, Senior Managing Director, Global Metaverse Continuum Business Group & Blockchain Lead at Accenture, will also take the stage of HGF to share his vision for the community and technology as the new chair of the Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board. 

“Each year, Hyperledger Global Forum is the single best opportunity to take stock of the evolution of the open-source enterprise blockchain market,” said newly elected Hyperledger Foundation Governing Board Chair David Treat, senior managing director, Global Metaverse Continuum Business Group & Blockchain Lead at Accenture. “The conversations and content this year will reflect the exponential pace of innovation and adoption occurring throughout the Hyperledger ecosystem. We have an amazing opportunity to scale Hyperledger’s impact as our community’s capabilities are the foundation of the emerging ‘Internet of Ownership’ Metaverse innovation wave.” 

New releases

Hyperledger Cactus 1.0 – Hyperledger Cactus is a blockchain integration tool designed to allow users to securely integrate different blockchains. With this 1.0 release, Cactus delivers “Ledger Connectors” for nine blockchain platforms (including all of the graduated DLTs from Hyperledger) using multiple programming languages.Cactus is a pluggable enterprise-grade framework for transacting multiple blockchains that aims to provide a decentralized, adaptable and secure integration between blockchains and various platforms. It code is composed of three types of parts:

• “Cactus Servers” that provide abstracted APIs that can be uniformly called independent of each blockchain SDK’s format, and APIs that can use each blockchain SDK wrapped with the typescript-axios API format using Cactus API Server.
• “Business Logic Plugins” that coordinate cross-blockchain business logic applications.
• “Ledger Connectors” that facilitate connections to various blockchains

The Hyperledger Cactus 1.0 release also includes Business Logic Plugin samples, Keychain Plugins (a set of plugins for storing sensitive information in storage engines outside of Cactus) and Support Libraries.

Hyperledger FireFly 1.0 – Hyperledger FireFly 1.0, a SuperNode for Enterprise Web3 Applications, combines a number of technical and market milestones. At its core, it offers a composable Web3 stack to help speed up decentralized application (dApp) development by a factor of 10x-100x, making it the first open-source SuperNode for enterprises to build and scale secure Web3 applications.

The Hyperledger FireFly SuperNode provides a new type of decentralized orchestration layer between companies’ existing systems and Web3. It enables the shift of value in open network systems and reduces the reliance on proprietary technology or custom-built code. It solves for the layers of complexity that sit between the low level blockchain and high level business processes and user interfaces, letting developers focus on building business logic instead of infrastructure.

Hyperledger FireFly is already in production deployments with a number of leading blockchain consortia today, including RiskStream Collaborative in the insurance industry, Synaptic Health Alliance in healthcare, TradeGo in commodity trade finance, and the international conglomerate CP Group.*

Hyperledger Iroha 2.0 LTS preview release – Hyperledger Iroha 2 is designed as a modular system with the flexibility to be deployed across a range of uses, from the simple to the complex. For example, it can be used as a toll-free intermediate ledger in a Hyperledger Cactus consortium or as a standalone ledger with transaction fees. It can just as easily connect to parity Substrate networks and provide Byzantine fault-tolerant governance. 

The second iteration of Hyperledger Iroha is close to being production-ready, but far from feature complete. The current preview release will serve as an LTS version, supported for the following six months, to allow developers to start using Iroha 2 to design in their products and get a preview of some of the innovative functions that are coming soon.

“This wave of milestones is a reflection of the high level of development momentum across the Hyperledger community as well as the increasing level of maturity of the enterprise blockchain market,” said Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director, Hyperledger Foundation, and General Manager Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity at the Linux Foundation. “The core value of enterprise blockchain has been well proven across industries, and our global and growing community is now building a rich ecosystem that will drive the next wave of interconnected, interoperable solutions. These developments are just a preview of the energy and ideas that will be the centerpiece of Hyperledger Global Forum.”

About Hyperledger Global Forum

Hyperledger Global Forum is the biggest annual gathering of the global Hyperledger community. It is a unique opportunity for contributors, members, service providers and enterprise end users from around the world to meet, align, plan and hack together in person. The event is open to any and all who are involved or interested in using, developing or learning more about Hyperledger’s open source enterprise blockchain technologies. Attendees will hear directly from those who are actively developing and deploying Hyperledger technologies as well as technology and business leaders who are shaping the future of enterprise blockchain. They will also have the chance to talk directly with Hyperledger project maintainers and the Technical Steering Committee, collaborate with other organizations on ideas that will directly impact the future of Hyperledger Foundation, and promote their work among the communities.

About Hyperledger Foundation

Hyperledger Foundation was founded in 2015 to bring transparency and efficiency to the enterprise market by fostering a thriving ecosystem around open source blockchain software technologies. As a project of the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Foundation coordinates a community of member and non member organizations, individual contributors and software developers building enterprise-grade platforms, libraries, tools and solutions for multi-party systems using blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies. Organizations join Hyperledger Foundation to demonstrate technical leadership, collaborate and network with others, and raise awareness around their efforts in the enterprise blockchain community. Members include industry-leading organizations in finance, banking, healthcare, supply chains, manufacturing, technology and beyond. All Hyperledger code is built publicly and available under the Apache license. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 1,800 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, Hyperledger Foundation, RISC-V, and more, are critical to the world’s infrastructure. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

*Paragraph added May 20, 2022.