We are excited to announce that today the DLT Landscape officially becomes the Hyperledger DLT Landscape.
The DLT Landscape is an open-source market segmentation initiative – modeled after the CNCF Landscape – that BTP initially launched in April 2021. See our original blog post The DLT Landscape Has Landed.
The creation of the DLT Landscape was inspired by the growing complexity of the evolving enterprise blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) market, more specifically, the increasing number of projects and companies innovating in areas outside of the core distributed ledger layer, which considerably transformed the vendor landscape in this space.
In the early days, a number of blockchain and distributed ledger protocols emerged catering to enterprise requirements and use cases, and were essentially the center of all activity. Since then, the enterprise blockchain/DLT space has evolved tremendously, with development focus and innovation moving up the stack, and conversations shifting from technology to business value.
With innovation blossoming at the intersection with other technologies – whether emerging or more established – as well as in areas such as interoperability, smart contracts, tokenization, and usability, among other things, the DLT vendor landscape has changed immensely.
The DLT Landscape was designed to address confusion over terms and where specific offerings and projects fit, whether open source or proprietary. In my prior life as a technology industry analyst, I often found that people were using the same terms for different things or different terms for the same thing, creating a lot of confusion, especially in the complex world that is DLT.
Additionally, the DLT Landscape – I believe – is a pretty useful tool for better product and project positioning, as well as partner and go-to-market strategies. We at BTP have been using it extensively in conversations with potential partners and clients.
Below you can see the initial framework or segmentation behind the DLT Landscape open-source initiative – which resembles a technology stack, but in my opinion is better defined as a business stack with a technology foundation. Regardless of difference of opinions on what it looks like, this is how the DLT Landscape journey started.
By using the CNCF Landscape code – which is obviously open source, and used across many Linux Foundation projects – we were able to transform this framework into an interactive, living market segmentation (web) application. Below there is a snapshot of me presenting the DLT Landscape – in its element – at the European Blockchain Convention in 2021.
Structurally, the DLT Landscape starts with the compute infrastructure layer at the bottom and goes on to distributed ledgers, technology intersections, interoperability, smart contracts and tokenization, application tooling and integrations. It also features the multiparty application layer at the top. On the two sides, you will find platforms, standards, and services. These are key layers and pillars that either represent critical technology components or provide key tools to drive the adoption of DLT.
We decided to contribute the DLT Landscape to the Hyperledger Foundation because we believe that it will help put all Hyperledger projects – that also evolve alongside the market – in context, as it provides a better understanding of the broader market, as well as where specific projects fit.
The brand-new Hyperledger DLT Landscape can be found here.
We invite the Hyperledger community – as well as the entire DLT market – to help shape it and evolve it. Don’t hesitate to reach out and/or submit a pull request!
About the Author
Csilla Zsigri is Chief Strategy Officer at BTP, a digital provenance company, a GBBC Ambassador, and a regular blogger and speaker on the subject of blockchain and associated concepts and technologies.