Hyperledger (or the Hyperledger Project) is an umbrella project of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

blockchains The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (g ...

and related tools that the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

started in December 2015.

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

, and

SAP Ariba SAP Ariba is an American software and information technology services company located in Palo Alto, California. It was acquired by German software maker SAP SE for $4.3 billion in 2012. Company beginnings Ariba (now SAP Ariba) was founded in ...

have contributed to support the collaborative development of

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

-based

distributed ledger A distributed ledger (also called a shared ledger or distributed ledger technology or DLT) is a system whereby replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data is geographically spread (distributed) across many sites, countries, or institutions. I ...

s. It was renamed the Hyperledger Foundation in October 2021. In September 2024, Hyperledger Foundation and Trust Over IP Foundation became part of the newly launched Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust.

History and aims

In December 2015, the

announced the creation of the Hyperledger Project. The founding project members were announced in February 2016, with ten further members and the governing board announced a month later on March 29. On May 19,

Brian Behlendorf Brian Behlendorf (born March 30, 1973) is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software ...

was appointed the project’s executive director. The project’s objective is to advance cross-industry collaboration by developing blockchains and distributed ledgers, focusing on improving the systems’ performance and reliability (compared to

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

designs) so they can support global business transactions by major technological, financial, and supply chain companies. The project integrates independent open protocols and standards in a framework for use-specific modules, including blockchains with their own consensus and storage routines, and services for identity, access control and

smart contract A smart contract is a computer program or a Transaction Protocol Data Unit, transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objective ...

s. There was some debate about whether the Hyperledger would develop its own bitcoin-type cryptocurrency, but Behlendorf clearly stated the Hyperledger Project would never build its own cryptocurrency. In early 2016, the project began accepting proposals for incubation of codebases and other technologies as core elements. One of the first proposals was for a codebase combining previous work by

Digital Asset A digital asset is anything that exists only in digital form and comes with a distinct usage right or distinct permission for use. Data that do not possess those rights are not considered assets. ''Digital assets'' include, but are not limited t ...

Blockstream Blockstream is a blockchain (database), blockchain technology company led by co-founder Adam Back, headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with offices and staff worldwide. The company develops products and services for the storage an ...

's libconsensus and

's OpenBlockchain. This codebase was later named Fabric and the foundation was renamed Hyperledger, a trademark contributed by one of Hyperledger's founding members,

, following their acquisition of a company called Hyperledger. In May, Intel's distributed ledger, named Sawtooth, was incubated. In January 2018, Hyperledger released the production-ready Sawtooth 1.0. In January 2019, the first long-term-support version of Hyperledger Fabric (v1.4) was announced. Daniela Barbosa was named executive director of Hyperledger Foundation in October 2021. Hart Montgomery was named Hyperledger Foundation first CTO in February 2022. In September 2024, Hyperledger Foundation became part the new Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LF Decentralized Trust). The 17 code bases and communities of Hyperledger Foundation and Trust over IP Foundation, another Linux Foundation hosted project, came under LF Decentralized Trust.

Members and governance

Early members of the initiative included blockchain ISVs, (Blockchain, ConsenSys,

, R3, Onchain), well-known technology platform companies (

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, s ...

, Fujitsu,

Hitachi () is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in various industries, including digital systems, power and renewable ener ...

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

, NTT DATA,

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, VMware), financial services firms ( ABN AMRO,

ANZ Bank The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, commonly known as ANZ Bank, is a multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It is Australia's second-largest bank by assets and fo ...

BNY Mellon The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, commonly known as BNY, is an American international financial services company headquartered in New York City. It was established in its current form in July 2007 by the merger of the Bank of New York an ...

CLS Group CLS Group (for Continuous Linked Settlement), or simply CLS, is a specialized financial market infrastructure group whose main entity is the New York-based CLS Bank. It started operations in 2002 and operates a unique and global central multicur ...

CME Group CME Group Inc. is an American financial services company based in Chicago that operates financial derivatives exchanges including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, and the Commodity Exchange. ...

, the

Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is an American financial market infrastructure company that provides clearing, settlement and trade reporting services to financial market participants. It performs the exchange of securities ...

(DTCC),

Deutsche Börse Group Deutsch ( , ) or Deutsche ( , ) may refer to: * or : the German language or in particular Standard German, spoken in central European countries and other places *Old High German language refers to Deutsch as a way to define the primary characteris ...

J.P. Morgan JP may refer to: Arts and media * ''JP'' (album), 2001, by American singer Jesse Powell * ''Jp'' (magazine), an American Jeep magazine * '' Jönköpings-Posten'', a Swedish newspaper * Judas Priest, an English heavy metal band * ''Jurassic Pa ...

, State Street,

SWIFT Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIF ...

Wells Fargo Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company with a significant global presence. The company operates in 35 countries and serves over 70 million customers worldwide. It is a systemically important fi ...

Sberbank The Public JSC Sberbank (, initially a contraction of ) is a Russian majority state-owned banking and financial services company headquartered in Moscow. As the Russian successor entity of the State Labor Savings Banks System of the USSR, it was ...

), business software companies like

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, academic institutions (Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Blockchain at Columbia, UCLA Blockchain Lab), systems integrators and others (

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, Calastone,

Wipro Wipro Limited () is an Indian multinational technology company based in Bengaluru. It provides information technology, consulting and business process services. It is one of India's Big Six IT services companies. Wipro's services include cloud ...

, Credits, Guardtime, IntellectEU, Nxt Foundation, Symbiont, Smart Block Laboratory). The governing board of the Hyperledger Project consists of ten members chaired by Robert Palatnick, (managing director and chief technology architect for DTCC), and a fifteen-member Technical Steering Committee chaired by Tracy Kuhrt, Associate Director, Blockchain and Multiparty Systems Architecture, at Accenture.

Notable frameworks

Hyperledger Besu

Besu is an enterprise-grade

Ethereum Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-s ...

codebase. Besu became a project of LF Decentralized Trust in September 2024.

Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain infrastructure, originally contributed by

and

, providing a modular architecture with a delineation of roles between the nodes in the infrastructure, execution of

Smart Contracts A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the re ...

(called "chaincode" in Fabric) and configurable consensus and membership services. A Fabric Network comprises (1) "Peer nodes", which execute chaincode, access ledger data, endorse transactions and interface with applications; (2) "Orderer nodes" which ensure the consistency of the blockchain and deliver the endorsed transactions to the peers of the network; and (3) Membership Service Providers (MSPs), each generally implemented as a Certificate Authority, managing

X.509 In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secure ...

certificates which are used to authenticate member identity and roles. Hyperledger Fabric allows for use of different consensus algorithms, but the consensus algorithm that is most commonly used with the platform is Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). Fabric is primarily aimed at integration projects, in which a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is required, offering no user facing services other than an SDK for Node.js,

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

and Go. Fabric supports chaincode in Go and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

(via Hyperledger Composer, or natively since v1.1) out-of-the-box, and other languages such as Java by installing appropriate modules. It is therefore potentially more flexible than competitors that only support a closed Smart Contract language. Hyperledger Fabric became a project of LF Decentralized Trust in September 2024.

Hyperledger Sawtooth

Originally contributed by Intel, Sawtooth includes a dynamic consensus feature enabling hot swapping consensus algorithms in a running network. Among the consensus options is a novel consensus protocol known as "Proof of Elapsed Time," a lottery-design consensus protocol that optionally builds on trusted execution environments provided by Intel's

Software Guard Extensions Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a set of instruction codes implementing trusted execution environment that are built into some Intel central processing units (CPUs). They allow user-level and operating system code to define protected priv ...

(SGX). Sawtooth supports Ethereum smart contracts via "seth" (a Sawtooth transaction processor integrating the Hyperledger Burrow EVM). In addition to Solidity support, Sawtooth includes SDKs for Python, Go, Javascript, Rust, Java, and C++. At the request of its maintainers, Hyperledger Sawtooth was archived as a project in February 2024.

Tools

Hyperledger Aries

Hyperledger Aries is a toolkit for decentralized identity solutions. It supports issuance, storage, and presentations of verifiable credentials, providing the functionality to create and manage decentralized, self-sovereign identities. It supports secure, peer-to-peer messaging using a variety of protocols. Aries includes implementations in Python, Go, .NET, and JavaScript. Hyperledger Aries interacts with other Hyperledger projects like Indy and Ursa. Indy provides the ledger technology, and Ursa provides shared cryptographic functions. Hyperledger Aries became a project of LF Decentralized Trust in September 2024.

Hyperledger Caliper

Hyperledger Caliper is a blockchain benchmark tool and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Caliper allows users to measure the performance of a specific blockchain implementation with a set of predefined use cases. Hyperledger Caliper will produce reports containing a number of performance indicators, such as TPS (Transactions Per Second), transaction latency, resource utilization etc. The intent is for Caliper results to be used by other Hyperledger projects as they build out their frameworks, and as a reference in supporting the choice of a blockchain implementation suitable for a user's specific needs. Hyperledger Caliper was initially contributed by developers from Huawei, Hyperchain, Oracle, Bitwise, Soramitsu, IBM and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Hyperledger Caliper became a project of LF Decentralized Trust in September 2024.

Hyperledger Cello

Hyperledger Cello is a blockchain module toolkit and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Cello aims to bring the on-demand "as-a-service" deployment model to the blockchain ecosystem to reduce the effort required for creating, managing and terminating blockchains. It provides a multi-tenant chain service efficiently and automatically on top of various infrastructures, e.g., baremetal, virtual machine, and more container platforms. Hyperledger Cello was initially contributed by IBM, with sponsors from Soramitsu, Huawei and Intel. Baohua Yang and Haitao Yue from IBM Research are committed part-time to developing and maintaining the project. Hyperledger Cello became a project of LF Decentralized Trust in September 2024.

Hyperledger Composer

Hyperledger Composer was a set of collaboration tools for building blockchain business networks that make it simple and fast for business owners and developers to create smart contracts and blockchain applications to solve business problems. Built with JavaScript, leveraging modern tools including node.js, npm, CLI and popular editors, Composer offered business-centric abstractions as well as sample apps with easy to test DevOps processes to create robust blockchain solutions that drive alignment across business requirements with technical development. Blockchain package management tooling contributed by IBM. Composer was a user-facing rapid prototyping tooling, running on top of Hyperledger Fabric, which allows the easy management of Assets (data stored on the blockchain), Participants (identity management, or member services) and Transactions (Chaincode, a.k.a. Smart Contracts, which operate on Assets on the behalf of a Participant). The resulting application can be exported as a package (a BNA file) which may be executed on a Hyperledger Fabric instance, with the support of a Node.js application (based on the Loopback application framework) and provide a REST interface to external applications. Composer provided a GUI user interface "Playground" for the creation of applications, and therefore represents an excellent starting point for Proof of Concept work. On the 27th of April, 2020 the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee has moved the Hyperledger Composer to the "End of Life" lifecycle stage, ending new development.

Hyperledger Explorer

Hyperledger Explorer was a blockchain module hosted by Hyperledger Foundation. Designed to create a user-friendly Web application, Hyperledger Explorer made it possible to view, invoke, deploy or query blocks, transactions and associated data, network information (name, status, list of nodes), chain codes and transaction families, as well as any other relevant information stored in the ledger. Hyperledger Explorer was initially contributed by IBM, Intel and DTCC. Hyperledger Explorer was moved to "End of Life" in 2022. in 2023, new leaders in the Explorer community took over development of the code, and it now a lab known as Blockchain Explorer under LF Decentralized Trust.

Hyperledger Quilt

Hyperledger Quilt was a business blockchain tool hosted by Hyperleder Foundation. Hyperledger Quilt offered interoperability between ledger systems by implementing the Interledger protocol (also known as ILP), which is primarily a payments protocol and is designed to transfer value across distributed ledgers and non-distributed ledgers. The Interledger protocol provides atomic swaps between ledgers (even non-blockchain or distributed ledgers) and a single account namespace for accounts within each ledger. With the addition of Quilt to Hyperledger, The Linux Foundation hosted both the Java (Quilt) and JavaScript (Interledger.js) Interledger implementations. Hyperledger Quilt was initially contributed by NTT Data and Ripple. It was moved to End of Life in 2022.

References

External links

* {{Cryptocurrency Blockchain entities Linux Foundation projects Organizations established in 2015