Building Better Together: Insights from the Governing Board to Mark Hyperledger Foundation’s 8th Anniversary

As a follow-up to Hyperledger 8: A Celebration of Building Better Together, Daniela Barbosa asked our Governing Board Representatives for their take on the success and value of Hyperledger Foundation as well as the technical priorities they see for the community. 

Read on for insights from David Treat, Senior Managing Director, Accenture; Johnna Powell, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology, Research and Innovation, DTTC; Kei Fukuta, Director of Blockchain Planning Department, Hitachi; and Gabi Zodik, Director of Blockchain and Web3, IBM Research. You can also watch the Hyperledger 8 event, with panels on “The Hyperledger Foundation Journey: Building the Enterprise-Grade Blockchain Market,” “Digital Assets and Tokenization: Today and Tomorrow,” and “Interoperability Update: Where We Are and Where We’re Going,” here.

Daniela Barbosa: What have been the keys to success for our Hyperledger community? 

David Treat: The keys to success for Hyperledger have been directly tied to its ability to build and evangelize a shared vision of blockchain technology that is inclusive, responsible, and community-first. It not only upholds the principles of open source but also advocates for open development, standards, and interoperability. Another key strength of the Hyperledger community was its enterprise focus with a deep understanding of what was required for real business value in the context of legal, business, and regulatory requirements. This overall approach has catalyzed a growth fly-wheel effect where the expertise within the community leads to the creation of cutting-edge technologies. These advancements, in turn, attract more skilled contributors who further enhance the products. This self-perpetuating cycle has been instrumental in the success of both Hyperledger and its thriving community.

Johnna Powell: The Hyperledger Foundation has done great work in developing, promoting and providing open-source distributed ledger technologies that are secure and adaptable to the needs of industries globally. The foundation has created an inclusive ecosystem that fosters innovation and evangelizes the practical applications of enterprise-grade blockchain technology.

Kei Fukuta: The technical excellence of Hyperledger projects is based on contributions from a global community of developers, ensuring the reliability and security of the platforms.

Gabi Zodik: I believe it is a combination of a very well-organized project (i.e., Hyperledger) from all aspects, management, marketing, community, education, etc. All these created the best possible open and transparent environment to attract companies and individual contributors to join this community and both contribute to the open-source projects and exploit them. I think we had a very good and productive collaboration among IBM and, in general, with the major companies that also contributes greatly to the success of the projects. Finally, the focus on enterprise needs brought in companies with mutual requirements.

Daniela: What is the value your organization gets from being a leading member of Hyperledger Foundation?

David: As a founding member of Hyperledger, we recognized, early on, the critical importance of bringing together diverse parties and organization types to realize the full potential of blockchain technologies. Blockchains inherently rely on shared data models, governance, and community. Through Hyperledger, we convene users, technology and service providers, and industry groups, providing us with a continuous and dynamic understanding of the core business and societal requirements for enterprise blockchain.

Johnna: DTCC has benefited greatly from our collaboration with the open-source community of enterprise-grade blockchain developers and business leaders. Hyperledger Besu is key infrastructure that DTCC’s Testnet is built upon, which enables broad compatibility with existing EVM open source tools and capabilities.

Kei: Being associated with Hyperledger Foundation enhances our company's reputation as one of the leaders in blockchain technology. It is a strength in competition against other companies.

Gabi: I think we get the opportunity to create a vibrant successful open-source project, with contributions from multiple external companies and individuals. Secondly, we get multiple companies that exploit the technology for their solution and in return we get real use cases that test the technology and raise new requirements.

Daniela: What, in your view, comes next for enterprise-grade blockchain? Where should our global community of developers be focusing on this point?

David: For 2024, we are very excited to see continued adoption of enterprise grade-blockchain and associated technologies across a variety of use cases – in the face of such rapidly growing opportunities, staying focused will be a challenge. We expect to see further advancements in digital ownership and interoperability of identity, money, and objects across digital experiences. As this convergence of digital ownership advances, we will also be exploring the intersection with spatial computing to add an immersive experience layer. Finally, we hope we can drive some thinking further out the innovation curve with a particular focus on the convergence of blockchain and AI. By providing a secure, decentralized platform for data storage and transfer, blockchain technology paves the way for superior AI systems. This is particularly advantageous in scenarios where data needs to be accessed by multiple parties, such as machine learning networks. The result? A more efficient training process for AI models, leading to enhanced accuracy and consistency.

Johnna: In my opinion, there are several evolving trends that will take shape in the next phase of enterprise-grade blockchain, including advancements in interoperability, increased adoption and integration, real-world use cases enabling improved scalability and performance, a much clearer regulatory framework, and enhanced security (e.g., quantum-resistant blockchains). The areas where developers can have the greatest impact from increased focus will be in interoperability and improved performance.

Kei: Blockchain should be integrated with other emerging technologies such as IoT, edge computing, and AI to create more useful solutions. These synergies will enable new use cases and enhance the capabilities of enterprise-grade blockchain platforms.

Gabi: I think the market matured from general purpose blockchain platforms to domain specific use cases. I think as a community we should identify the industries where blockchain/DLTs make a real difference and bring unique differentiated capabilities. We already observe use cases in the Digital Assets (e.g., Tokenized Deposits, CBDC) that benefit greatly from the decentralization and privacy capabilities of DLTs. Similarly, sustainability is an emerging domain that can benefit from the transparency, accountability that DLTs can provide.

__

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our full Governing Board for the time and effort they spend supporting Hyperledger Foundation and the expertise and guidance they provide. Many of them have been part of this journey since the start, so happy 8th anniversary to them as well.

To celebrate this milestone, get your #HyperledgerLove t-shirt from our new brand store! (Use code HyperledgerLove for 20% off).