The Hyperledger blockchain consortium is continuing to gain momentum, adding eight new members including Deloitte and Ernest & Young. Hyperledger now has 142 members, up substantially from the initial 30 who joined the project at launch in February 2016. Here are the key details from Hyperledger's announcement:
“These new members have joined Hyperledger bringing a diverse set of skills at a crucial time,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “Consensus is a great platform for our members to set the stage and speak to what’s happening in our community, as production blockchain deployments increase."
Hosted at the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger encompasses a set of open-source projects around various aspects of blockchain technology. The arrival of Deloitte and Ernst & Young should help further its mission of finding vertical applications for blockchain. Other new members announced this week include Alphapoint, Change Healthcare, CITIC, Clause Inc, FZG360 Network Co. Ltd and Schroder Investment Management Limited.
Hyperledger also announced that two projects, Sawtooth and Iroha, have graduated from incubation to "active" status at the Linux Foundation. The first focuses on scalability and security issues, while the latter seeks to create a componentized blockchain framework whose parts can be used in other implementations.
In March, Hyperledger announced that its Fabric project was the first to achieve active status. While the ranking doesn't denote a production-ready version 1.0, among other criteria it means the project has achieved enough diversity of support to survive any one company dropping out.
Overall, this week's news is good for the Hyperledger effort, as well as the future of business, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"In order for digital business ecosystems and markets to function in a frictionless manner, they must have the commercial capability provided by a distributed ledger to allow any to any business transactions to be recorded," he says. "The quality of the membership of the HyperLedger project says a great deal about the business value well-known enterprises are placing upon its success."
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