Hyperledger Project Grows To 30 Members; Announces Governance Structure And Other Updates

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced on Tuesday the members, open governance structure and technical updates to the new Hyperledger Project that was announced at the end of 2015.

“The Hyperledger Project has ramped up incredibly fast, a testament to how much pent-up interest, potential and enterprise demand there is for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

Project Members

The members involved in the initiative have grown to 30 and include: ABN AMRO, Accenture, ANZ Bank, Blockchain, BNY Mellon, Calastone, Cisco, CLS, CME Group, ConsenSys, Credits, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Deutsche Börse Group, Digital Asset Holdings, Fujitsu Limited, Guardtime, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, IntellectEU, J.P. Morgan, NEC, NTT DATA, R3, Red Hat, State Street, SWIFT, Symbiont, VMware and Wells Fargo.  

The Linux Foundation has officially formed the Hyperledger Project and is accepting new members. Those who are interested to join the initiative can connect with its technical community via mailing lists and GitHub. It has just started reviewing contributions and is engaging on potential ideas for kicking off the technical project.

Technical Updates

The initiative, since the December announcement, has received proposed code and technology contributions from several companies, including Blockstream, Digital Asset, IBM and Ripple. Other community members, the Linux Foundation said, “are contemplating contributions of their own”.

Open Governance Structure

To facilitate an open ecosystem, the Hyperledger Project was structured with an open governance model:

• Technical Steering Committee (TSC): Technical contributions will be reviewed by the newly formed TSC, which is comprised of industry-leading technical experts. This group will oversee the project’s technical direction and working groups as well as manage multiple contributions to the code base. It will be assessing proposed contributions and go through an open community process to build out the initial and unified codebase.
• Board of Directors: The board will guide business decisions, marketing and ensure alignment between the technical communities and members. Nominations are currently open for TSC members. 

The trademark for the initiative’s name ‘Hyperledger’ has been given by Digital Asset. The press release said that the use of the mark will be managed exclusively by the Governing Board of the Hyperledger Project with the approval of the Linux Foundation.