Hyperledger Global Expansion Adds Seven New Members to Blockchain Initiative

The Hyperledger Project, led by the Linux Foundation and aimed at the development of an enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger framework and codebase, recently announced that seven new members have joined the project.

New members are INVeSHARE, MonetaGo, Swedish developer Norbloc, the Moscow Exchange, and three Chinese firms: BitSE, Belink Technologies and Onchain.

“The enterprise application of blockchain technology is set to change the way we conduct business and will have a profound impact across all sectors of business,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Project. “To be able to welcome this many new members each month is not only a testament to what we are doing but is paramount to our success in developing distributed ledger technology for the world.”

The growing global dimension of the Hyperledger Project, with its new Russian and Chinese members, seems especially interesting. In fact, while payment and financial applications of distributed ledger technology are relatively well established in Europe and the English speaking world, new applications beyond finance, such as smart contracts, e-voting and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) as well as new markets such as (the potentially huge) Chinese market, are likely to attract more interest and investments in the coming year.

The Moscow Exchange, formed in December 2011 by merging the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX) and the Russian Trading System, is the largest exchange group in Russia; operating trading markets in equities, bonds, derivatives, the foreign exchange market, money markets and precious metals. The Moscow Exchange Group also operates the National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, and the country’s largest clearing service provider (National Clearing Center).

In May, Bitcoin Magazine reported that the NSD developed and successfully tested an e-proxy voting system running on a distributed ledger built with the NXT distributed cryptographic platform.

“Moscow Exchange is excited to join the Hyperledger Project,” said Sergei Poliakoff, CIO of Moscow Exchange. “We believe in the future impact of distributed ledger technologies for the whole financial industry. Our team has been exploring possible applications of blockchain in trading, clearing and settlement. We’re looking forward to working with this robust community to further Hyperledger’s vision and shared ledger technology.”

Shanghai-based BitSE, established in 2013 by founders from IBM, Alibaba and Louis Vuitton, developed Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) applications. The company operates a research lab focused on distributed consensus, distributed applications and smart contracts. The company’s products include VeChain, an anti-counterfeiting solution. BitSE is also developing blockchain development and running environment Quantum, smart contract applications and private blockchains. Earlier in June, BitSE established a partnership with PwC China to create a team of 50 specialists and bring one-stop blockchain technology solutions to the China market.

“Blockchain technology is likely to take human beings to a new big era of an economy republic; Hyperledger is the foundation writing the constitution,” said D.J. Qian, co-founder and CEO of BitSE. “With an R&D team of blockchain, coming from nine different countries, BitSE is more than happy to be part of it as one of the pioneers and willing to contribute thoughts, codes and anything that matters to accelerate this evolution and reformation.” 

Belink Technologies is a financial information service provider operating a distributed ledger technology for enterprise registration and the distribution of non-cash digital assets. “Using an open source framework for distributed ledgers could reduce the technical threshold of application innovation and promote the establishment of uniform standards,” said Chen Hua, CEO of Belink. “Belink is especially pleased to become an active participant in the Hyperledger Project, as the need to adopt distributed ledger technology to help institutions carry out financial service innovation in China grows.”

Onchain, a blockchain technology startup in China, developed the AntShares project for registration of digital assets. The project is described in a white paper (Chinese only) and its open source code, distributed under the MIT license, is available online on Github. “As a leading open-source contributor in China’s blockchain community, Onchain shares the same values as the Linux Foundation and the Hyperledger project intrinsically,” said Da Hongfei, founder and CEO of Onchain. “We believe international collaboration plus local experience are key to the adoption of distributed ledger technology in China. We are also very excited to see other Chinese blockchain startups join Hyperledger and look forward to adding our combined expertise to the project.”

See the Hyperledger announcement for quotes from other new members.

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