Trust and transparency are essential for advancing digital systems in today's interconnected world. The Hiero project), a groundbreaking open source initiative under Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, is at the forefront of advancing decentralized trust and addressing these needs.
Hiero and Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust
Hiero was launched in September 2024 as a project of Linux Foundation’s Decentralized Trust, a non-profit specializing in DLT and other decentralized technologies that operates as part of the broader Linux Foundation (LF). Since its establishment in 2000, the Linux Foundation has become a global leader in open-source development, supporting over 900 active projects and setting widely recognized standards for collaboration and innovation. With the workflows and concepts of LF, several leading projects and standards, such as Kubernetes, have been created in a vendor-neutral manner.
Hiero is an open source, vendor-neutral Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) codebase designed for transparency and collaboration. As an open-source project, the software is publicly accessible, enabling anyone to propose enhancements or redistribute modified versions. Vendor neutrality ensures that the project’s development and governance remain independent of any single organization, fostering balanced decision-making and shared control. These principles, rooted in Hiero and the Linux Foundation’s approach, guarantee that no single entity can dominate the project’s direction, governance, or outcomes, promoting fairness, innovation, and long-term sustainability.
Hedera, the enterprise-grade Public DLT and a Founder Premier Member of LF Decentralized Trust, has committed to donate its entire codebase to Hiero, totaling over 40 million lines of code. This transfer process to be fully vendor-neutral has already commenced, with SDKs for Go and C++ transferred. When completed, this will make Hiero a major hub for production-ready DLT technology that is already tested and trusted globally.
Companies such as Hedera, Hashgraph, and LimeChain work alongside individual contributors to develop Hiero, with all participants having an equal voice. As a result, no single company has the power to lead or overtake the project, ensuring that its direction remains driven by community consensus.
An additional benefit of Hiero's codebase being open source and vendor neutral is that it opens up new development opportunities. Developers can leverage a wealth of tooling and use it flexibly, accelerating development and enabling new use cases, such as private or semi-private networks. The benefits of community involvement are already being seen: for example, a community-driven Python Software Development Kit (SDK) is already in progress.
All the mentioned practices and benefits of LF Decentralized Trust make Hiero better adaptable and usable to organizations, governments, and developers without concerns or risks that often apply to a product developed by only one vendor.
Hiero: A New Frontier for Decentralized Trust
Hiero’s open source DLT model and vendor-neutral status will allow it to offer the global community higher levels of trust, representing a paradigm shift from centralized to decentralized systems of trust.
Centralized systems often create low levels of trust. Such systems inherently require a single authority—an intermediary or master data source—to act as the arbiter and keeper of records. This central authority introduces risks, including inefficiencies, a single point of failure, and the potential for abuse or lack of transparency. This means that the central authority may struggle to be trusted, which may distort how they can interact with other organizations.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) offers an alternative by decentralizing the management and recording of data across multiple participants. Unlike traditional centralized databases, DLT ensures that all participants maintain synchronized and immutable copies of the ledger. This approach enhances transparency, security, and trust, eliminating the need for a single controlling authority.
Decentralized Trust and Finance
Trust is the cornerstone of all financial systems, yet in today's interconnected world, achieving it often depends on intermediaries. These intermediaries, such as banks or clearinghouses, serve as the trusted third parties facilitating transactions, but their involvement introduces inefficiencies, costs, and delays. For example, a cross-country transfer often requires multiple smaller transfers, making the process slow and expensive.
Case Study: Standard Bank and Shinhan Bank
South Africa’s Standard Bank and South Korea’s Shinhan Bank conducted research to identify the shortcomings of existing cross-country transfers. Their findings revealed that a single transfer from South Africa to South Korea involved:
- Transaction Fees: At least $40 in fees
- Significant Delays: Transactions would often take over a week to complete
- Lack of Transparency: Neither party could track the transaction very well.
What if you had a trusted and secure way to send money overseas? In this way, you may not need to rely on multiple other banks to help process the transfer and convert the currency; you can do it directly.
The banks created a proof of concept to test direct cross-country transfers. A proof of concept on Hedera DLT, adjusted for their needs, demonstrated to the banks they could transfer cross-border directly from account to account with a guarantee the funds would arrive. In this test, Standard Bank and Shinhan Bank used stablecoins to represent the South African Rand and the South Korean Won. A stablecoin is a digital token or coin that represents a real-world asset like a real currency. Any money transfer between the banks now triggers a transaction in the Hedera network that uses the given stablecoins to represent the money. This experiment achieved significant improvements:
- Minimal Costs: Transaction fees dropped to just $0.10, even with additional bank charges included.
- Instant Transfers: Funds were delivered in under a minute.
- Full Transparency and Record: Real-time tracking ensured all parties could monitor the transaction’s progress and have a record.
- 24/7 Availability: Always-on system breaking free from the limitations of traditional banking hours.
Overall, by having a distributed ledger to help process cross-border transactions, remarkable improvements were noted on speed, cost, and transparency. While this example showcases the Hedera network, networks built on Hiero could also facilitate such transactions depending on business requirements, growing the role of DLT technologies in finance. For instance, banks could choose to create a private network, where each bank runs a node, to address specific regulatory and privacy requirements while still leveraging the strengths of a decentralized system.
Decentralized Trust and Supply Chains
Supply chains are a second example of systems that depend on trust. Yet, the traditional methods of managing shared data in supply chains often leave room for error and exploitation.
For example, imagine two companies collaborating on a shared project that involves exchanging critical data, such as supply chain information for mobile phones.
Company A and Company B must share high-quality data to manufacture a product. They later find they have mismatched data: one company believes a part will arrive next week and the other the following week. As a result, this creates a data management problem: not only does one company have incorrect data, which could compromise the supply chain, but the companies now need to agree on how to overwrite the data and who should be responsible for that. Since only one company will now be the controller of the data, this can introduce risks as bad actors could exploit this centralized authority to manipulate or compromise the information.
What if instead of sharing data in a low-trust way, data was processed by a DLT leveraging the Hiero codebase? As none of the companies now control the data, these companies could trust the quality of the data and share it seamlessly, even if they are on other sides of the world. The companies could even run a node of the decentralized network. As a result, Hiero as a trusted DLT codebase, can help to not only achieve efficiency improvements but to create new use cases and ways of working.
The Synergy Between Hiero and Hedera
Hedera is an enterprise-ready public DLT, meaning it has the decentralized node infrastructure to process transactions in a public, immutable and enterprise-friendly way. Governed by a council of over 30 large corporations and institutions and offering high speeds, scalability and security, Hedera has a remarkable code-base and goes beyond.
Hedera has donated its entire codebase to Hiero, which will be used to run the Hedera mainnet, allowing Hedera to fully benefit from open-source and vendor-neutral development. While leveraging Hiero’s code, it’s important to note that Hiero itself is not a network.
By transitioning to a vendor-neutral DLT framework under Hiero, Hedera benefits from an open, shared codebase supported by a broader community that can support more use-cases. This ensures that the Hedera Mainnet continues to thrive, leveraging the transparency, collaboration, and interoperability provided by Hiero while remaining a robust, enterprise-grade public network. Hiero, in turn, benefits from Hedera’s initial and ongoing contributions.
Hedera is not only the largest public network based on Hiero but also dedicates significant resources to the development and success of the Hiero project. Its position as the flagship network ensures that Hiero benefits from Hedera’s enterprise-grade capabilities, its established ecosystem, and its continued innovation. There is no intention or need to create a public network parallel to Hedera. Hedera remains central to Hiero’s vision and will continue to lead as the primary public network built on this open-source foundation.
This shared, open foundation also enables other organizations, universities, and enterprises to create private or public Hiero-based networks. These networks can coexist with Hedera and foster a broader decentralized ecosystem while adhering to the same standards and principles. Hedera remains at the forefront as a leading public distributed ledger and becomes even stronger as part of the Hiero ecosystem, driving its growth and success.
Transforming Trust Through Open Collaboration
The Hiero project represents a transformative step for decentralized trust and ways of working. Hiero unlocks new possibilities for developers and businesses by providing high-quality, workable and trusted DLT technology, allowing them to craft decentralized applications and networks tailored to their needs while contributing to the broader ecosystem. Hedera, as a Hiero-based network, seeks to leverage these benefits for its enterprise-grade public ledger and will, at present, become Hiero’s largest user.
With the flexibility of a shared codebase and the power of open collaboration, Hiero and Hedera pave the way for a future where decentralized trust is accessible, scalable, and impactful.
Get involved
To learn more about Hiero, join us for an online technical workshop about Hiero’s SDKs on February 13 at 9AM Pacific. (Register in advance for a chance to win the brand-new Heiro T-shirt.)
You are also welcome to join the bi-weekly Hiero community calls to connect with other people in the Hiero community. Those calls are open for everyone and can be used by the community to ask questions, discuss topics and bring in new ideas.
For any asynchronous questions and comments, the project uses GitHub Discussions and the LFDT Discord.
You can also find a growing list of articles, presentation recordings, and other media about Hiero that has been created by our community at https://github.com/hiero-ledger/awesome-contributions.
About the Authors
Sophie Bulloch is a new member of the Hiero community, contributing Python code to the SDK, creating video documentation, and attending various community and TSC calls. She has an economics and a technical background.
Hendrik Ebbers leads the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) of Hiero and has been a core committer to the consensus node of Hedera for several years. Hendrik is a member of the Board of Directors of the Eclipse Foundation. In addition to Hiero, he is leading several open-source projects as a member of working groups and committees like Eclipse Adoptium or JakartaEE and actively contributing to even more projects.