Meet Hyperledger: An “Umbrella” for Open Source Blockchain & Smart Contract Technologies

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It’s hard to believe I’ve been working at The Linux Foundation on Hyperledger for four months already. I’ve been blown away by the amount of interest and support the project has received since the beginning of the year. As things really start to take off, I think it’s important to take a step back to reflect and recapitulate why and what we’re doing with Hyperledger. Simply put, we see Hyperledger as an “umbrella” for software developer communities building open source blockchain and related technologies. In this blog post, I’m going to try to define what we mean by “umbrella,” that is, the rationale behind it and how we expect that model to work towards building a neutral, foundational community.

The Hyperledger Project was initially seeded with various blockchain-supporting commercial members, some of whom had interesting internal or nascent open source efforts that needed the kind of home that the Linux Foundation could provide. It emerged at a time when it was clear that three points needed to be made to the market:

  1. Open, transparent governance of the software development process for blockchain technologies matters
  2. Intellectual property provenance and safeguards of the software matters
  3. Key use cases are driving permissioned or “consortium” chain models

Read more at The Hyperledger Project