[Summit] Brian Behlendarf, Managing Director of the Hyperledger Project - Hyperledger, a new world of open source

Reporter: Pencil lead

Here I want to thank Wanxiang and Vitalik Buterin. I think Ethereum and Bitcoin have brought us these very good technologies and brought them to the open source world. What I want to share with you today is the Hyperledger project, which I am responsible for. In fact, it is not easy for us to integrate different technical projects and different communities together. We want all these people to work in the same direction, so this is also not easy.

First, let's take a look at Hyperledger. Hyperledger is not the only project, or the only string of code. In fact, we are a community of communities. We hope that eventually, through the community of communities, we can benefit our user solution providers and developers. So we are also involved in different industries. We are not only concerned with the financial industry. Of course, we say that the financial industry has also played a very positive role in the development of blockchain. In fact, we are also very interested in some other industries. Through such a community, we hope to create a big family of enterprise-level open source blockchain platforms and libraries. In such a big family, everyone can run their own applications, so we are an open source organization.

In fact, our 2.0 version was created by myself. I actually worked for a software organization before, in 1995, and we have been working on such a project. Another project, we hope to bring together developers and service providers with our end users, and then promote the development and promotion of software. So for me, I think for our project, no single company can complete such a task, because we are not only focusing on developers. For example, we know that Linik (sound), he is a very famous developer, in fact, he is just one of their company. If Linik is allowed to run it, it is actually inseparable from the support of other developers.

Another thing is that we hope to build a community cooperation environment. We hope to establish such a virtual community where everyone can discuss with each other and provide us with some infrastructure and other help. Of course, regarding open source projects, we hope to help all companies complete their development. Of course, this also involves the issue of management models. We hope to ultimately avoid risks that our users encounter when using the program.

Regarding Hyperledger, it is actually owned by the Linux Foundation. In fact, it has been developed for 10 years. It has a community like Hyperledger. We hope to focus on the code and all the necessary infrastructure to eventually make our products available. Of course, we can also provide training and certification services. Of course, what we want to ensure here is that any company can benefit from the Linux Foundation. At the beginning, there was Linux Foundation. We also have other open source projects, such as Cloudfgundry, Nodo, and Xen projects. All of these projects provide us with higher quality services.

This involves the partners of Hyperledger. It is because of their support that we have been able to achieve this. At the beginning, the members were all known to everyone, such as IBM. In fact, IBM also provided us with a lot of open source code. Then we also have some initial company members such as Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Calendar, etc. Of course, we are very honored that Wanda in China has also joined our Hyperledger, and Airbus and other large companies have joined our Hyperledger. Currently, 85 companies have joined Hyperledger, of which 20 are from mainland China.

In May, I gave a speech at a summit in Beijing. Of course, there were 300 people in attendance, and everyone was very interested in our Hyperledger. It was for this reason that we established our Chinese community. For example, we established our WeChat group, and then we also started to create a local team in mainland China and Hong Kong. We hope that they can work together with some local organizations to create a local team in China. Of course, we also hope that the Chinese office can build a bridge between China and abroad.

In fact, I have always believed that there will be many changes in the future, and I have always believed that there is no single or single blockchain. We now know that there is a blockchain for currency, but in the future we will have all chains that make up such a chain. We know that some chains are made up of currency, but not all blockchains are related to currency. The language of its smart contract may be different, and the characteristics of their different chains are also different. So if we think about the needs of an industry, we may need to think about the language of the smart contract required by this industry and the rules that this application should follow. Because we say that different applications have different rules, so this is very similar to the database we are talking about.

Here, I think we can actually think of our project as a distributed project. What we believe is that after we have these different chains, the most important point is that if the code at the bottom of the chain is more common, or the code is more shared, we believe that our development can be faster. So this actually applies to Linux Nexus. We hope to use Linux Nexus on small devices or large devices. In fact, I think we are still in the early stages of development of blockchain technology. We built our own website in 1992. In fact, I worked for a magazine company in 1993 and helped them build their website. Now blockchain is like the Internet in 1994, which was still in its infancy. We may not have definite answers to many questions.

Hyperledger also has our vision. We hope to become a community with multiple communities and multiple projects. As a Hyperledger project, we generally include a team of volunteer developers who need to write code in an open environment, and then manage their own roadmap and the date of releasing their projects. The reason why we are a community with multiple communities is that all of our developers can share some of their development experiences and lessons. Here, I believe that in addition to lessons, the more important thing is to share valuable experience. And we also talk about the Aproject software license. If you tell the company that your software or code is open source, then their concern may be whether your code or your software itself is legal or safe. Here we also use a shared software license. And all of our products or projects will use a common software license, so this means that we use the same license to facilitate the development of this software. And we will have a shared IP framework, which means that after we get the code, we know where the code comes from. This is what we call the proof of the developer garden, which is also very important.

Of course, we will also have shared tools, because I think it is very important that our projects need to share, and I hope that our programs can be used by users in the end. We will also promote the projects among members, and all projects are treated equally.

We currently have two major projects, one is Fabric, which is based on IBM's contribution. We certainly hope to add some important members to this project. Fabric is actually a private chain or a consortium chain. It may not be public, but all its codes are visible, which creates a consensus mechanism. It is developed using the GO language.

Another project is Sawtooth Lake, which is mainly a contribution to the Internet. Here we have proof of elapsed time. Of course, all our other projects are open source, and we hope to learn from other projects. Because our private chain may be different from the public chain, and we have different architectures, so we are very happy to develop any ideas, public chain platforms, and currency-based platforms.

Of course, there are two other projects. One is the Hyperledger browser. Of course, we also hope to have some further developments, such as the development of blockchains related to medical records, public chains, and the energy industry. This is what we just said. We are not limited to the financial industry, we hope to expand to other industries.

Why do we need a hyperledger? First of all, we have to say that cooperation is actually very difficult. It is difficult for these competing companies to reach a consensus, because it is still in the early stages, so we still have many unknowns, but we need a lot of experiments, and then we will eventually turn these experiments into a real production environment. So we need to become a trusted platform. If we want our community to work together, we first need to stimulate their social motivation. In fact, the community itself is very fragile, and the project is also very fragile, so we hope to become a hyperledger project for 20 to 25 years, and we are here for continuous development.

Here is what I mean by open source projects. There are three communities promoting them. These three communities have different understandings of technology. This is about the structure of standards, such as ISO, and the implementers and creators of technology, such as those who write code. Sometimes they may be what we call decision makers, and sometimes they may have to cooperate with a government to write such a code. So we say that different institutions have different concerns or considerations. This makes us know that we are not contributing software to a specific network. We hope that the software can be universal in all networks. Another point is that we also need to consider that when an interface becomes an industry-recognized standard, if there is a bug that needs to be solved, we also need to work together to solve the bug. I hope that communities like ours can face challenges together and fight better battles.

Here, we see that everyone has never seen a currency like Hyperledger, so we created the Hyperledger, hoping that everyone will work together to open up the technology, because we know that in the past few years, Ethereum has also had many solutions to these problems. But we know that we are very interested in platforms driven by currency, because we think some problems can be finally solved through such a platform.

This is our direction and vision. We hope that more and more members will join us. Of course, I want to reiterate here that we are very fond of or committed to cooperating with the Chinese community. For example, we also hope to carry out some localized work in China to develop our team, because this will enable our global technology to be widely used. Thank you!