The most commercially valuable open source blockchain project: Hyperledger (1)

introduction:

The open source blockchain project – Hyperledger was established only one year ago, and 100 companies have joined it. It is currently the most commercially valuable blockchain open source project. This series introduces the ins and outs of the Hyperledger project, as well as the status of projects such as Fabric and Sawtooth Lake. (This article is excerpted from the author’s new book “Blockchain Technology Guide” , and is also published on the Henry Notes WeChat public account)

Project Background

Cryptocurrencies represented by Bitcoin have achieved great success, with the number of active users and transaction volume growing year by year. People are also gradually realizing the potential value of blockchain technology, which can not only be used as the underlying technology of Bitcoin, but also be applied to more business scenarios. As a result, many new applications that use the Bitcoin public chain have emerged, such as asset registration, notarization, etc. However, the Bitcoin public chain cannot overcome some of its inherent problems: for example, low transaction efficiency, no finality of blocks, etc. These problems make public chains such as Bitcoin unable to meet the requirements of most commercial applications.

In order to overcome the above shortcomings, it is urgent to design a blockchain platform suitable for commercial use. In response to strong calls from all walks of life, the Linux Foundation launched an open source project called "Hyperledger" in December 2015, aiming to promote collaboration among all parties to jointly create enterprise-level distributed ledger underlying technology based on blockchain, which can be used to build industry applications and platforms that support business, so as to support a variety of commercial application scenarios.

Judging from the founding members, the companies participating in the Hyperledger project are quite luxurious, including not only technology giants such as IBM, Intel, and Cisco, but also financial giants such as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and ABN AMRO, as well as blockchain-focused companies such as R3 and ConsenSys. As of December 2016, the Hyperledger project has brought together 100 companies from around the world (including many Chinese companies), and its momentum is unmatched by other technology alliances or open source projects. Whether in terms of the number of codes or community participation, Hyperledger is the largest blockchain open source project. Compared with public chain projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum that are dominated by geeks, Hyperledger is a commercial alliance chain project led by large enterprises.

Project Management Form

The Hyperledger Project is made up of member companies. As long as you are a member company of the Linux Foundation and pay a certain annual fee, you can become a member of the Hyperledger Project. According to the amount of the annual fee paid, you can be divided into Premier Member and General Member. There is also an Associate Member who does not need to pay but has no voting rights. After becoming a member of the Hyperledger Project, you can participate in daily meetings, enjoy member privileges and fulfill member obligations.

The Hyperledger project has a Governing Board, which is responsible for daily management, including reviewing budgets, supervising projects and market activities, and voting on important matters. Each primary member can appoint one board member, and ordinary members can elect no more than two board members each year. The chairman of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and an End User Technical Advisory Board (EU-TAB) are also members of the board.

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is elected by the project's contributors or maintainers. Its main task is to ensure the normal progress of the project technically, including formulating technical directions, approving project proposals, setting up working groups and work processes, and communicating with technical community users. Anyone can become a contributor to the project by contributing code, documents, or other technical products. Some project contributors will become maintainers of the project and have the right to manage the code base. The TSC will also elect a chairman as a member of the board of directors to strengthen communication between the TSC and the board of directors.

The Hyperledger project has also established a Marketing Committee and a User Advisory Group, of which one representative can participate in the discussion and voting of the Council.

The goal of the Hyperledger project is to provide underlying support for commercial blockchain applications. Therefore, a business-friendly license is used for intellectual property. All code added to the project must use the Apache V2.0 license agreement, and the code provided by the project to the outside world also complies with the Apache V2.0 license agreement, which is a very broad license agreement that can meet the needs of most commercial applications. The project's documentation follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and is suitable for commercial and non-commercial use.

Project life cycle management

Hyperledger includes many different projects. Each project is a collaborative effort of the community in some aspect, which can be the creation of various documents or the development of code for specific functions. Hyperledger adopts the common incubation process of open source projects. On the one hand, it encourages the community to put forward more new suggestions, and on the other hand, it provides the community with guidance on the progress of the project so as to understand whether the project is mature and available, or is in the trial or development stage.

Hyperledger projects can be in five states according to their development level: proposal, incubation, maturity, abandonment and termination. During the development of a project, it may iterate between several states multiple times.

(1) Proposal

A proposal is a suggestion for setting up a project. Anyone can submit a proposal to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). The proposal needs to have a clear description and scope of the project, confirm the resources to be invested in the development and the project maintainer, and must be a vendor-neutral solution. If the TSC approves the proposal, the project will be officially launched and managed by the relevant project maintainer, and the project will enter the incubation period.

(2) Incubation

For projects that enter the incubation stage, a dedicated code base will be created under the Hyperledger Github account so that the community can collaborate on development and explore different solutions together to add the required functions to the project. Hyperledger will include multiple incubation projects at the same time. In order to encourage community innovation, there may be overlaps between projects. In the long run, we can eventually learn from each other's strengths and weaknesses, extract and merge common or complementary functions between projects into the framework of the same project, and realize a complete technical solution.

The goal of an incubation project is to make the code reach stable and usable quality standards, have a mature release process, and have a large number of active developers in the community. The maintainer of the project can apply to the Technical Steering Committee for approval to announce that the project has turned into a mature state. Of course, due to improper implementation or changes in goals, the project may not be able to turn from incubation to mature state.

(3) Maturity

Projects that graduate from the incubation state will enter the mature state, and the results of the project are suitable for use in actual applications. Like most open source projects, mature projects will continue to add and improve features, fix bugs, and release updated versions regularly.

(4) Abandonment

When a project reaches a certain stage and no longer meets actual needs due to various reasons, the project maintainers can vote on whether to put the project into a deprecated state. If the deprecation decision is passed, the Technical Steering Committee will announce that the project has entered the deprecated stage.

(5) Termination

After 6 months in the deprecation phase, the project officially entered the End of Life period and was no longer maintained or developed.

Project development status

Many of the initial member companies of Hyperledger have developed their own blockchain projects, and they all hope to contribute these codes to Hyperledger and become one of its projects. The candidate projects of these member companies have both focused and repeated functions, so the best way is to integrate these projects, share what they have and what they don’t have, and form a complete and unified solution. As of December 2016, there are three projects that have passed the proposal and entered the incubation state: Fabric, Sawtooth Lake and Iroha.

Fabric is an integration of codes from three companies, IBM, Digital Asset and Blockstream. Since the codes of the three companies were originally developed in different languages, they could not be directly merged together. Through a hackathon programming, the three projects originally written in different languages ​​were finally integrated together to realize the basic blockchain transactions and monitoring balance changes. The results of this hackathon laid the foundation for the Fabric project.

Sawtooth Lake is a highly modular platform for building, deploying and running distributed ledgers, which comes from Intel's code contribution. The project mainly provides a scalable distributed ledger transaction platform and two consensus algorithms, namely Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) and Quorum Voting.

Iroha is a code developed by several companies including Japanese startup Soramitsu and Hitachi, mainly as a supplement to Fabric and Sawtooth Lake, focusing on the development of mobile applications.

As more proposals are approved, Hyperledger will include more and more projects. We will introduce projects such as Fabric and Sawtooth Lake later. (To be continued)

For more information about Hyperledger and technical details of blockchain, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, public blockchain, consortium blockchain, sidechain, lightning network, etc., please refer to the author’s new book: “Blockchain Technology Guide” :