What’s Hyperledger that Caught Major Companies’ Attention?

Hyperledger is a promotion community that builds an open source blockchain platform. It was based on a non-profiting American joint venture, the Linux Foundation, in December 2015.

It was established with the aim of promoting the use of blockchain technology not only in "virtual currency" but also in various fields.

Blockchain technology is expected to reduce the cost required for system management currently.

Initially, virtual currency attracted public attention because of it has drastically reduced the commission charges of remittances, but now it is possible to automate it not only by recording transaction history such as using Smart Contract, but also by recording the program. The technology has been expanded in many ways.

From this aspect, blockchain technology can be incorporated in various fields such as finance, insurance, manufacturing and others to reduce costs, as well as to build applications and platforms with high reliability and transparency.

When people say blockchain, people think of virtual currencies such as bit coins and Ethereum, but as mentioned earlier, its usage can be various.

Virtual currency can be classified based on public type, and anyone can issue his or her original currency and let others to purchase.

However, Hyperledger does not issue tokens from its platform.

Hyperledger is a private type or a consortium type of system that constructs applications and platforms that applies characteristics of blockchain technology for utilizing it in various fields of social systems.

Many Japanese companies are paying attention to products offered by Hyperledger. Mizuho Bank, one of the megabanks, has also conducted verifications aiming to advance the trade finance infrastructure.

Furthermore, at Fujitsu, which was reported previously, "Hyperledger Fabric" is used for demonstrational experiment with Japan Net Bank.

Toshiya Cho of Hitachi, Ltd., Japan's largest electrical equipment maker, is the only member of Hyperledger project board who lives in Japan.

Several projects are been processing in Hyperledger

Hyperledger fabric is a project lead by IBM, a global IT company in the United States.

It is aiming to become the foundation of application and solution development in blockchain technology, as well as testing the exchanging process of applications and secure blockchain networks for various use cases.

Hyperledger Sawtooth is a project initiated by Intel in the United States that runs an open source distributed ledger with resource consumption reducing function.
Its feature is that each of its devices can be divided into parts and can be replaced.

Hyperledger Iroha is a project led by Soramitsu Corporation.

Soramitsu (soramitsu) is a startup company mainly focusing on blockchain service developing business for financial and nonfinancial aspects.

It uses simple design, and is thus easy to understand for developers and to develop. Soramitsu adopts an independently developed consensus-building algorithm "Sumeragi" (Chain-based BFT algorithm).

A library that can issue / transmit digital assets such as currency and points easily (without implementing chain code) is prepared, which achieved the aims of simplification of introducing and maintaining the system.

Hyperledger Burrow is a project led by Monax and Intel aiming to develop permission-type smart contract machines derived from Ethereum.

Utilization of Hyperledger is expected to happen in various fields such as finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.

With 8 ongoing projects, over 130 members are work together to build a company level blockchain platform.

As IBM and Intel are leading their projects, it is clear that major companies are paying attention as well, and they may be standardized in the future.