You’ve heard of Bitcoin, but do you know the tech behind it? It relies on a public distributed ledger called blockchain – which is what makes it secure, because it’s verifiable. Blockchain is a digital distributed record of transactions that is maintained by a network of computers on the internet, without the need of a centralised authority.
Now there’s a thing called the Hyperledger project. This is a cross-industry open source blockchain group led by the Linux Foundation, with participation of more than 120 members including IBM, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Cisco Systems Inc and the Bank of England.
The point of Hyperledger is to use Blockchain technology in other industries, integrating into operations, making processes more secure and trackable. Now, the project has plans to release its first production-ready distributed ledger code base by the end of the month, Reuters reports.
Most recently, the technical committee of the Hyperledger project had promoted its first blockchain project, Hyperledger Fabric, to an active phase. Developers from over 20 companies came together for Fabric, but the project hasn’t gone into performance-testing phase yet.
According to Reuters, “Hyperledger Fabric is a type of blockchain designed be used as a foundation to build distributed applications. The team of software developers involved in the project is finalizing the first version of Fabric that could be used by large businesses to build applications and plans to release by the end of March, according to the blog post.”
The Hyperledger project started in December 2015, and acts as an umbrella for communities of software developers building blockchain frameworks and platforms.
The project aims to create a code that people can use to integrate into their productions and operations. Many major businesses, including world’s largest banks, have been actively investing and participating in the technology to help reduce complexity and costs of some of the process – such as securities settlement and international payments.
The technology is maturing and certain implementation has started including diamond registering and tracking with Everledger. However, very few large-scale implementations having been made public.
