Hyperledger Accepts New Members Including Microsoft & Ethereum

Hyperledger, the umbrella project of open-source blockchains and related tools, has announced that it has accepted eight new members and launched a new project focusing on new infrastructure for decentralised identity. This includes the Ethereum Foundation and Microsoft.

The Ethereum Foundation is proud to lend our support to the efforts of both the @EntEthAlliance and @Hyperledger through our membership today. Together, we'll continue to drive forward #Ethereum's progress and adoption.

— Ethereum (@ethereum) June 18, 2019

The executive director of Hyperledger, Brian Behlendorf said:

“The mix of blue chip technology companies, international organizations, logistics and manufacturing players and academia that have joined us from point around the world show the widespread interest and investment in open source enterprise blockchain technologies. This broad-based involvement is what drives our expanding portfolio of open source projects, which are fully conceived, developed and advanced by the ever-growing Hyperledger community.”

Spin-off

An almost spin-off project from Hyperledger is Hyperledger Aries following Ursa, which provides a library advanced cryptographic operations consolidated from other Hyperledger projects. With Aries, this project follows the work of Indy to provide a protocol on a decentralised identity.

The announcement states, that Aries intention is to:

“Provide code for peer-to-peer interaction, secrets management, verifiable information exchange, and secure messaging for different decentralized systems… Foster practical interoperability in support of ongoing standards work and extend the applicability of technologies developed within Indy beyond its current community components from the Hyperledger stack into a single, effective business solution.”

The Chief Trust Officer at Evernym explains that Aries is different from the Indy project:

“When it first began, the Hyperledger Indy project included code for all three of the lower layers…This was very powerful, but also somewhat overwhelming for new developers. And it gave the impression that layers 2 and 3 were tied to the Hyperledger Indy permissioned blockchain code at layer 1.”