In December 2015, the Linux Foundation announced the creation of the Hyperledger Project. The founding members of the project were announced in February 2016 and ten further members and the makeup of the governing board were announced March 29. On May 19, Brian Behlendorf was appointed executive director of the project. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperledger)

Hyperledger is not a cryptocurrency.

Hyperledger is an open-source community focused on developing a suite of stable frameworks, tools and libraries for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments. It was created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology. (https://www.hyperledger.org/)

It serves as a neutral home for various distributed ledger frameworks including Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, Indy, as well as tools like Hyperledger Caliper and libraries like Hyperledger Ursa.

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, Blockstream‘s libconsensus and IBM‘s OpenBlockchain.This was later named Fabric. In May, Intel’s distributed ledger, named Sawtooth, was incubated.

In January 2018, Hyperledger released the production-ready Sawtooth 1.0. In January of 2019, the first long-term-support version of Hyperledger Fabric (v1.4) was announced. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperledger)

Today Hyperledger has an impressive list of more than 100 members. The list covers a wide scope of well know industry leaders. It includes mobility tech giants like Airbus and Daimler, IT-companies like IBM, Fujitsu, SAP, Huawei, Nokia, Intel and Samsung, financial institutions like Deutsche Börse, American Express, J.P. Morgan, BBVA, BNP Paribas and Well Fargo, as well as Blockchain startups like Blockstream, Netki, Lykke, Factom, bloq and Consensys. A lot of the world’s largest companies in Tech and Finance meet at Hyperledger with some of the hottest blockchain startups. (https://blockgeeks.com/guides/hyperledger/)

In the question and answer section of hyperledger website there are some useful informations;

Can I use Hyperledger within my product? What are the license requirements?

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort that is hosted by The Linux Foundation.  All Hyperledger source code is licensed under Apache 2.0 license, unless an appropriate exception has been obtained. A summary of the license can be found at https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0); however, we recommend consulting a legal expert who can help you understand the license of Hyperledger source code more clearly, including any dependencies that the source code has.

How much does Hyperledger cost?

All projects are open source, which means that you can download and use the software free of charge.

When you deploy the blockchain network using one of the Hyperledger frameworks (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric), you will need to pay for the hardware necessary to run the underlying blockchain network, as well as, the application code that you write to access the blockchain network. This hardware could be located on-premise or in the cloud. This would be the same model that you would have with any other type of software that you might need to install to run your use case.

Do I need to join Hyperledger in order to use it in projects?

All projects are open source, which means that you can download and use the software free of charge without joining Hyperledger.

How do I contribute a source base to Hyperledger?

There are two ways to contribute a source base to Hyperledger.

  1. Hyperledger Labs – https://hyperledger-labs.github.io/ details the requirements and process to propose a lab.
  2. Hyperledger project – The project lifecycle details the process that a project must go through in order to be accepted into incubation, as well as, to move to an active project within Hyperledger.

Which Hyperledger project will allow me to create a blockchain network with smart contracts?

Six different DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies) that you can use to set up your own blockchain network (in alphabetical order):

All of the frameworks, except Hyperledger Indy, are general purpose — meaning that you can store whatever type of asset you want. Hyperledger Indy is a framework that is focused on decentralized identity. Besides the project pages, you can also have a look at the Hyperledger Whitepaper, which explains the different projects that we have.

Also, there is a video , Business Blockchain Projects Hosted by Hyperledger, that explains all of the projects that are hosted by Hyperledger in just under 16 minutes. There are also two architectural white papers that go into details on each of the frameworks with regards to consensus and smart contracts.

What consensus mechanism does hyperledger use?

The architectural white paper covering consensus goes into specifics about the consensus algorithms that each of the frameworks uses.

Does Hyperledger require a large amount of energy?

None of the Hyperledger frameworks utilize proof of work (PoW), as they do not require mining. Because the frameworks are designed for permissioned networks where the actors are known, they can use consensus mechanisms that are crash fault tolerant or byzantine fault tolerant, which do not require the amount of compute power that PoW does. The architectural white paper covering consensus goes into specifics about the consensus algorithms that each of the frameworks uses.

Where is the public Hyperledger network?

The different frameworks within Hyperledger are designed for enterprise business blockchains. You can use the frameworks to set up your own networks. As such, there is no public network.

Who and which industries are using Hyperledger?

Check out the Blockchain Showcase, which lists a number of cross-industry projects that are using Hyperledger frameworks and tools.

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