While the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project is not the only blockchain implementation out there, enterprises interested in distributed ledger technology should pay attention to it in 2017. In less than a year, the effort gained 100 active members and now another eight have joined, the Foundation announced:
“This year has been full of growth for the project,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “Not only did we exceed 100 members, Hyperledger met significant development milestones thanks to the community’s hard work. As 2016 was a year of exploration, R&D and prototyping, we’re excited for 2017 to be the year we start to see case studies of the technology in production environments.”
Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base. The latest members include: CA Technologies, Factom Foundation, Hashed Health, Koscom, LedgerDomain, Lykke, Sovrin Foundation and Swisscom.
The new members are diverse, with Factom Foundation focused on blockchain applications for identity and security; Hashed Health on health care; Koscom, Lykke and Swisscom on financial services; and LedgerDomain on supply chain.
Hyperledger's popularity and membership will likely continue to grow rapidly in 2017, as will other implementations such as R3, which has attracted participation from scores of financial services companies.
As with any emerging technology, enterprises should take a deliberately careful approach to adoption. Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson recently authored an in-depth report, "How to Conduct Effective Blockchain R&D":
Many companies investing in blockchain technology and developing applications rushed into this exploding field with scant reflection on what it was designed for. Consequentially, they overlooked blockchain’s limitations. Many have tried to build on the original public blockchain, while others saw its problems, especially in regulated markets, and explored a wide range of hybrids. A third category of researchers went back to the drawing board to search for improved ways of doing what blockchain did.
Wilson's report takes a deep dive into a framework enterprises can use to develop blockchain solutions, as well as provides blockchain implementation case studies on Hyperledger, Ping Identity and R3. An excerpt is available at this link.
As for Hyperledger specifically, it has a number of notable qualities, Wilson says. "They add a lot of value with what they call legal infrastructure," he says. "They have a very specific promise that people who use the hyperledger codebase have a reduced legal risk." In addition, Hyperledger has a highly rigorous configuration management process with very thorough peer review of code changes, Wilson adds.
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