As I look back at 2021, I am amazed by what we as a global community have achieved together in our journey to be the premier open source community of software developers building enterprise blockchain, distributed ledgers, and related technologies.

First, I want to thank everyone for your passion and commitment to the Hyperledger community. Without your contributions and support, we could not have achieved any of the highlights I have included below. There are thousands and thousands of you out there, touching so many aspects of our community and ecosystem, and I hope each of you sees how you have contributed to our successes this year and how you are helping us build upon them for 2022 and beyond.

The list below may seem overwhelming at first, but this is what we are creating worldwide. We have been busy, educating, building, improving, innovating and becoming leaders across multiple ecosystems. 

For me, often it seems that not a day goes by without me discovering something new that our community is doing and building with Hyperledger technology. I know that this volume of activity makes it hard for people to understand what “Hyperledger” is, how they can use Hyperledger technology or simply how to get involved in our community so they can also learn, build and innovate. 

This year, as we prepared to celebrate our 6th year anniversary, we acknowledged that the Hyperledger of today is not the same as the Hyperledger of 2016. In October we announced that Hyperledger is now Hyperledger Foundation. As our ecosystem and community grow, we need a clear identity for our organization that arches over all our projects, labs, regional chapters, working groups, special interest groups and overall collective effort to advance enterprise blockchain technology. The Hyperledger Foundation brand offers that clarity. It also positions us to fulfill our newly updated mission to be the premier community of software developers building enterprise grade open source software, in the form of platforms, libraries, tools and solutions, for multiparty systems using blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies.

This year, we have seen growth across all areas of the Hyperledger Foundation – from new projects to virtual events and growth in our ecosystem and community as outlined below and in the recent Hyperledger Foundation 2021 End-of-year Update on the Linux Foundation Blog. I believe that 2022 will be a year of acceleration for enterprise blockchain as I highlighted in this op-ed Up the adoption curve: why 2022 will be a year of acceleration for enterprise blockchain on the enterprise blockchain news website Ledger Insights.

This fall we also published an updated Hyperledger Foundation overview paper that provides a high-level overview of Hyperledger as an organization, including why it exists, what it does, and who is involved. It also covers our Hyperledger technologies and their impact on existing and new markets. Finally, this paper looks at the roadmap to widespread adoption of Hyperledger platforms, tools, and libraries to power a new generation of multiparty systems. If you have not had a chance to read it, I encourage you to.

Our 2021 Hyperledger Brand Study provided some insight on how Hyperledger is perceived in the market and confirms much of the progress both the industry and Hyperledger have made in just over five years.

In October, I took over as Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation after four years as Vice President of Worldwide Alliances serving our community worldwide. Over the last few months, I have spoken with many of you about what you see our community becoming and how you want to contribute, and I am really forward to working with you and our staff to make the Hyperledger Foundation a place for anyone who wants to advance, adopt and build the future of blockchain in the enterprise. 

They say it takes a village, but leadership is also important so we are also grateful for the stewardship that Brian Behlendorf provided our Hyperledger community since 2016 and look forward to his successes as Executive Director of the new Linux Foundation project, Open Source Security Foundation.

Read More about this change in leadership 

• Passing the Baton by Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation, Linux Foundation
• Hyperledger is almost six years old, but who’s counting by Robert Palatnick, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Research and Innovation, DTCC, and Chair of the Hyperledger Governing Board
• Writing the Next Chapter for Hyperledger by Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director at Hyperledger and General Manager, Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity for the Linux Foundation

As we head into 2022, I want to pause to also acknowledge the challenges and losses that many in our community have experienced as we collectively move through this global COVID pandemic. 

On behalf of the entire Hyperledger Foundation team, I want to also congratulate all our communities for their successes under another extraordinarily challenging year and wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous 2022.

I hope you enjoy reading these fantastic highlights and reflecting on the incredible progress we have achieved together this year.

Daniela Barbosa
Executive Director, Hyperledger Foundation 
The Linux Foundation

2021 Momentum

Membership 

Today, Hyperledger Foundation membership includes the world leaders in enterprise blockchain including our premier members Accenture, ConsenSys, DTCC, Fujitsu, HItachi, IBM and JPMorgan. The Hyperledger ecosystem continues to grow across small, large and global members. This year we welcomed 28 new members across the globe from China, India, Spain, France, Germany, South Korea, German, Poland, Hong Kong and the United States. From large companies like Siemens, Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Software and Verizon to small and medium-sized industry leaders like ConsenSys Health, Kaleido, Rootchain, Indicio and more. 

Investment from these leading organizations signifies a strong dedication to the advancement and sustainability of enterprise blockchain for years to come. Read all our 2021 new member announcements to learn about why these organizations joined the Hyperledger Foundation. 

Growth in Commercial Ecosystem 

As commercial adoption of Hyperledger continues to grow and POCs move into production, companies look to the Hyperledger Foundation to identify vendors and partners to work with. The Hyperledger Certified Service Provider (HCSP) program is a recognized program of pre-qualified, vetted service providers that have deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Hyperledger. This year we welcomed six new HCSPs and now companies looking for help can choose from over 25 HCSPs, including leading global companies like Wipro, NEC, Avanza Innovations, ProInsight, Tencent, IntellectEU and more.

In the News: Hyperledger Members Building, Deploying and Growing

The media continued to highlight Hyperledger technologies being used across multiple sectors and use cases in 2021, with coverage bridging across blockchain industry publications like CoinDesk and Ledger Insights to mainstream and local media like Bloomberg, Irish Times and more. Articles include coverage of deployments, investments and acquisitions of Hyperledger members.

Telling our Story: Hyperledger Member Case Studies 

Showing how Hyperledger technologies are being used is an important part of what the Hyperledger Foundation is tasked with. This year alone, the Hyperledger Foundation published 10 Member Case Studies highlighting how Hyperledger technologies are being used across many use cases and Hyperledger projects. These case studies help explain how distributed ledger technologies are being used and why Hyperledger technologies are selected. Learn more about how each case study was developed by reading our launch posts.

Read our 2021 Case Studies 

Project Updates 

The Hyperledger project landscape is a diverse grouping of distributed ledgers, tools and libraries. Six graduated Hyperledger Projects and 11 incubating Hyperledger Projects represent our project community as defined by our project lifecycle.

The project lifecycle is governed by our Technical Steering Committee, which consists of 15 elected members of the technical contributor community. The responsibilities of the TSC are to steer the technical direction for Hyperledger. Each year, the Hyperledger technical community holds an election to select a new Technical Steering Committee (TSC) from the community at large. The main objective of the TSC is to drive technical governance for the projects and technologies hosted by the Hyperledger Foundation. The 2021-2022 TSC was elected in October and you can read more here. This year, the TSC is being led by Tracy Kuhrt, Associate Director, Blockchain and Multiparty Systems Architecture, Accenture (chair), and Danno Ferrin, Principal Software Engineer, Hedera (vice chair).

Each quarter all Hyperledger projects report to the TSC, and it is a great way for our community to understand how these projects are doing, what future work is being planned and how contributors can participate. Read our 2021 Updates here. 

Some 2021 project highlights include: 

In February 2021, Hyperledger Aries graduated to active status and joined Hyperledger Indy as “production ready” Hyperledger projects for decentralized identity. Hyperledger Aries provides reusable, interoperable tool kits designed for initiatives and solutions focused on creating, transmitting and storing verifiable digital credentials. Read more here. 

This year, the Hyperledger Besu project community decided to switch its versioning to calendar versioning, known as CalVer, instead of the historic semantic versioning used by other Hyperledger projects. Some of the newest release features include the Flexible Privacy Group Performance tests and Mainnet Support Work, including preparing for the Berlin Network Upgrade and EIP-1559 support. Read more here. 

Hyperledger Fabric v2.4.1 was released Dec 17th 2021. v2.2 is the current LTS release with patch releases quarterly. Hyperledger Fabric has stabilized with an LTS release process and incremental new features being added in minor releases. View all quarterly reports.

2021 brought us two new projects, Hyperledger Bevel and Hyperledger Firefly! 

New Project: Hyperledger Bevel

Announcement Date: December 13, 2021

Hyperledger Bevel is an accelerator/tool that helps developers rapidly set up and deploy secure, scalable and production-ready DLT network(s) that also allows new organizations to be easily on-boarded on the network. Bevel, started as a Hyperledger Lab called Blockchain Automation Framework (BAF) and built a community of contributors during 2021. Learn more. 

New Project: Hyperledger Firefly

Announcement Date: September 28, 2021

Hyperledger FireFly is a multi-party system for enterprise data flows. It provides a purpose-built system upon which to build decentralized blockchain applications. It solves for the layers of complexity that sit between the low level blockchain and high level business processes and user interfaces. FireFly enables developers to build blockchain apps for enterprises significantly faster by allowing them to focus on business logic instead of commodity infrastructure foundations. Learn more.

Innovations in our Hyperledger Labs 

Hyperledger Foundation aims to help build communities by gathering people sharing a common interest in developing blockchain related software. Hyperledger Labs provides a space where work can easily be started without the creation of an official Hyperledger project. Hyperledger Labs have been not only a very active part of our community in 2021, but have nurtured new projects Hyperledger Bevel and Firefly as outlined above. 

Today there are over 50 Hyperledger Labs that our community is working on including Minifabric: a Hyperledger Lab aimed at accelerating the move to production and YUI, one of the new Hyperledger Labs taking on cross-chain and off-chain operations. 

The top 10 Most Active Labs by Pull Requests are as follows: (as of Nov 2021)

• Blockchain-automation-framework (now Hyperledger Bevel)
• business-partner-agent
• orion (orion-server, orion-sdk-go) 
• solang 
• fabric-smart-client
• perun (perun-*, go-perun)
• fabric-token-sdk
• weaver-dlt-interoperability
• blockchain-carbon-accounting
• fabric-operations-console

Hyperledger Events 

Hyperledger Global Forum

While we all wanted to gather in person, like we did in March 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona (one of the last in-person events many of us attended), 2021 forced us to have Hyperledger Global Forum as a virtual event from June 8-10. The event was a success and feedback from the attendee survey was overwhelmingly positive:  97% would recommend this event to an industry friend.

We had a lot to celebrate as a community as we got together in June and as David Treat, Global Technology Incubation Lead and Global Blockchain Multiparty Systems Lead, at Accenture, said in this post leading up to the event, “In the year since we last saw each other, we’ve made immense progress in inventing new forms of money, re-platforming financial services infrastructure, rearchitecting supply chains into resilient and secure supply networks, and pursuing self-managed digital identity.”

The three day event was jam packed with presentations and panels from companies, developers and communities building with Hyperledger and had over 250 virtual speakers. Keynotes included HE Serey Chea, National Bank of Cambodia, Frank Yiannas, Deputy Commissioner FDA, a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder, Ethereum and more. Some highlights of sessions on CBDCs, programmable money and interoperability can be found in this two part post – Part I and Part II. And other recorded sessions, on topics like Climate Action, Supply Chains, NFTS and more.

A big thank you to our event sponsors and partners for HFG 2021 including: Accenture (Diamond and Diversity & Inclusion Sponsor), IBM (Diamond Sponsor), Filecoin Foundation (Platinum), Hitachi (Platinum), Siemens  (Platinum), Zuellig Pharma (Platinum), AWS (Silver), BTP (Silver), Chainyard (Silver), ConsenSys (Silver), KrypC (Silver & Wellness), DTTC (Closed Captioning and Translation), Walmart Global Tech (Parent & Caregiver Support Program), Crypto Open Patent Alliance – COPA (Birds of Feather), Black Women Blockchain Council (Community), Diversity in Blockchain (Community), Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (Community), Greater Blockchain Business Council (Community), Kerala Blockchain Academy – KBA (Community), Trusted Blockchain Initiatives (Community), Blocknews (Media Partner), Cointelegraph China (Media Partner), CoinSpeaker (Media Partner), CrytoNewsZ (Media Partner), Forekast (Media Partner), Ledger Insights (Media Partner) and Tuoluo Finance (Media Partner). 

Hyperledger Member Summit

The Hyperledger Member Summit took place online this year for the second consecutive year. Since virtual has lost its novelty, we streamlined the event to two half-day sessions to reach two regions. With 349 people registered, about 220 attendees across two  regional programs, 11 sessions total, and 130+ companies represented, we had a strong showing for our second Hyperledger Member Summit in the Covid era. The overall feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from our members who attended.

Our Member Portal, once again served as a collaboration tool to document the activities and proposals coming out of the Summit. As a result, anyone that works at a member company can go back and review the recordings and SWOT output from each session throughout the year. Given the success of it last year, we brought back the China Community session to allow broader participation and inclusivity in our member community. In addition, interpreters allowed for our Chinese community to listen to the entirety of the event in Chinese.

We thank all our Hyperledger Member community members for their participation and contributions to this year’s Member Summit! 

Hyperledger Member Webinars 

Showing what is possible with Hyperledger technology is an important part of how the Hyperledger Foundation serves members and the community. One of the best ways to do that is to highlight what our member companies are building with different Hyperledger projects. Our Member Webinars is a series of hour-long sessions where Hyperledger members share learnings from their projects and try to answer all the hard questions about the opportunities and challenges of working with DLTs.

In 2021, our members contributed to 24 virtual webinars covering multiple projects, like Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu and Hyperledger Indy, across various use cases, including NFTs, DeFI, CyberSecurity and more.

Community & Diversity

Our community is global and growing. Developing community at the local level, joining together to take on technical and industry challenges and creating pathways for developers to learn skills and build careers are all central to our work of fostering a thriving ecosystem around open source blockchain software technologies.

Our Hyperledger Meetup Community by the numbers in 2021:

• Number of virtual meetups: 135 (A small number of in person events were also held in 2021, including the very first Hyperledger meetup in Rwanda! See video)
• Number of participants at meetups: Over 5,000 attendees at virtual events
• Number of languages used to host meetups: 12 (Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Portuguese, French, Urdu, Korean, English, Japanese, Hungarian, Chinese)
• Number of people in Hyperledger meetup groups: over 81,000!

Many of our Meetups are live streamed/recorded and available on YouTube via our Meetup playlist. Some recent highlights from 2021 include:

• Interoperability among Blockchains – Hyperledger Frankfurt – Dec 17th 2021
• Hyperledger Tokyo Virtual Meetup – Hyperledger Tokyo – Nov 25th 2021
• Atomic cross chain swap between Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum – Hyperledger Budapest – Nov 24th 2021
• Hyperledger Fabric Deployment on AWS, IBM, and Oracle platforms – Hyperledger Washington, DC – Nov 11th 2021

Looking for other places to connect into the Hyperledger community? One of the highlights of 2021 has been the activity and contributions of our virtual global communities. Find a local or industry connection with our:

• Regional Chapters: Hyperledger Regional Chapters are organized groups of community members in different parts of the world that are working together to address contribution barriers in their regions. We currently have chapters in Africa, Brazil, India, Italy, Japan and Latinoamerica. Check out our YouTube Regional chapter playlist for the latest event
• Special Interest Groups – Hyperledger SIGs are communities focused on a particular industry sector or activity with a shared interest in advancing a common understanding of how blockchain technology in general, and Hyperledger technology in particular, may be applicable. Many of our SIGs are live streamed/recorded and then available on the SIG youtube playlist or on their wiki agenda pages

Special acknowledgment to our Chinese community, especially to our Technical Working Group China/超级账本中国技术工作组 (TWG China or TWGC), that is a bridge between the global Hyperledger community, and the emerging technical user and contributor community in China and the greater China region, including Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Training & Certification 

As we recently wrote in our Staff Corner blog series, one of the biggest barriers to growth for the blockchain industry is the talent gap for developers with the right skills and training. Recognizing the coming demand, Hyperledger Foundation, in partnership with the Linux Foundation Training, has worked for years on developing a robust and growing set of enterprise blockchain training and certifications for developers.

We continued to enhance and offer more options for our community including: 

In 2021, we updated our Blockchain Essentials courses that over 200,000 people have taken since its launch:

New for 2021:

We also launched a new self-paced online course for Hyperledger Besu developers:

We announced Hyperledger Indy and Aires Workshops for Q1 2022 that complement our free online existing course: Introduction to Hyperledger Sovereign Identity Blockchain Solutions: Indy, Aries & Ursa and Becoming and Aries Developer.

Our Hyperledger Fabric Developer and Administrator Certifications were also updated in 2021 and are becoming core requirements for Hyperledger Fabric engineers.

And, last but not least, we know that blockchain technology needs to be taught and understood at the executive level across all industries so in 2021 we partnered with Wharton Wharton Executive Education on their 2022 “The Economics of Blockchain and Digital Assets” online certification. Our Hyperledger community contributed to the course work and hosted a webinar to share more information about this program. The curriculum includes case studies on deployments by two Hyperledger Foundation members:

• Soramitsu’s Bank of Bakong CBDC project, built using Hyperledger Iroha
• Poste Italiane’s new generation of digital identity services, which is powered by Hyperledger Besu

Mentoring 

2021 Mentorship Program. This year we sponsored 21 mentorships- The Hyperledger Mentorship Program is a structured hands-on learning opportunity for new developers who may otherwise lack the opportunity to gain exposure to Hyperledger open source development and entry to the technical community.

Check out these Mentorship Spotlights that highlight the work done by the Mentors and the Mentees as part of their program participation.

Hyperledger Ecosystem Expansion at the Linux Foundation 

2021 was also the year that Hyperledger technologies made their way again across to other Linux Foundation open source projects some examples: 

• openIDL – The Open Insurance Data Link platform and project built with Hyperledger Fabric formally launched on April 12th with major insurance carriers like Hanover, The Hartford and Travelers in partnership with AAIS. The platform aims to reduce the cost of regulatory reporting for insurance carriers, provide a standardized data repository for analytics and a connection point for third parties to deliver new applications to members. As of December,  US insurance state regulators from Mississippi, Virginia, Main and Connecticut are members of openIDL and actively participating in the open source project. 
• LF Public Health – Launched the Cardea project built on the Hyperledger technology. Cardea is a complete ecosystem for the exchange of privacy-preserving digital health credentials, open sourced by Indicio.tech as a project in LFPH. 

Wow, you made it to the end of 2021 year in review post. Congrats! But this is only the start of great things our community will be building and delivering in 2022 and beyond.

Join Us in 2022!