The blockchain strategy, vision and direction of the Hyperledger project leader

Hyperledger, the Linux Foundation-led project that advances blockchain technology through collaborative cross-industry efforts, recently announced that 17 new organizations have joined them to help create an open distributed ledger standard for a new generation of transactional applications. The project's membership now exceeds 80, an increase of nearly 170% in the past six months.

Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger project, said in an announcement of the new members:

“The response to our vision of creating an open blockchain technology community has been tremendous. I am very proud of reaching this milestone in membership. With an average of nearly two new members per week, no one knows how many members we will have by the end of the year. I look forward to working with this growing community to further strengthen our open blockchain development efforts.”

Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Behlendorf to learn more about the project’s direction, vision, and strategy.

Behlendorf said:

“Hyperledger has seen impressive growth in new member companies, new developers, and new versions of all our projects (Fabric, Sawtooth Lake, and Explorer), and our staffing continues to grow. Our core projects are always evolving, and we may see new additions and new versions of existing projects before the end of the year.”

The Hyperledger Project is developing open-source technology for a new distributed ledger that will fork off from the bitcoin blockchain. Many prominent Hyperledger members, notably Accenture and Digital Asset Holdings CEO Blythe Masters, have voiced support for “permissioned” blockchains that offer the benefits of public blockchain-powered digital currencies; fast and cheap transactions permanently recorded on a shared ledger, without the cumbersome openness of the bitcoin network. This suggests that the Hyperledger Project in general may support permissioned blockchains , which, according to experts, may not be able to replicate the strong network effects of bitcoin.

Behlendorf does not believe that Bitcoin will die or be replaced by permissioned blockchains . He commented:

“Permissioned blockchains don’t solve all the problems people are concerned about. I think Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies and distributed application platforms have a long and bright future. Some cryptocurrencies may not last long, but they do solve some problems and have active user and developer communities around them. I think over time we will find that there are a lot of gray areas between ‘permissioned’ and ‘unpermissioned’. I hope to explore these areas through Hyperledger’s project.”

At the same time, Behlendorf does not believe that permissioned blockchains can replicate the network effects of Bitcoin. He said:

“While there is no inherent reason why permissioned blockchains cannot have a very large number of nodes and participants, it is very hard to achieve this. While distributed ledgers are more like databases than networks, some of the “network effects” of distributed ledgers look a lot like the network effects of everyone using SQL, even if they use a different technology stack.”

However, Bitcoin's liberal early adopters continue to resist Bitcoin's move toward mainstream and regulated distributed ledgers. It is also possible that new blockchains with strong privacy (such as the upcoming Zcash) will fill the role Bitcoin originally played. So perhaps we are heading towards a dual blockchain system with a mainstream 'sanitized' banking blockchain and a secret blockchain for untraceable internet transfers.

Behlendorf said:

“I don’t think it’s going to unfold like this. We’re going to have many public chains and technologies (technically, I think Zcash looks pretty cool) and many private chains because there are so many different kinds of communities and use cases. It’s unrealistic to expect one blockchain to be everything to everyone. We should be asking ourselves how do we maximize reuse and code sharing between all the software that powers these blockchains. That’s what we hope to be able to do with the help of Hyperledger.”