The newly established Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LF Decentralized Trust) aims to drive the development of decentralized technologies such as blockchain, cryptography and digital identities. The enterprise-focused blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric 3.0 has already made it its new home.
LF Decentralized Trust is now the umbrella organisation for everything related to blockchain, digital trust, and decentralised identity systems. The earlier Hyperledger Foundation and TrustOverIP, set up in 2020 as a separate Joint Development Foundation, have been brought into this new umbrella organization. This happened along with other projects that may lack sex appeal but cover a lot of important work.
“Around the world, decentralized technologies are modernizing critical systems and core infrastructure,” said Daniela Barbosa, the Executive Director of the brand new LF Decentralized Trust. “LF Decentralized Trust is the new home for collaboratively developing the ecosystems that will make these trusted systems and applications.”
A new place for an older project
This new addition to the tribe of open-source foundations was announced during the Open Source Summit in Vienna this week. The main focus was on Hyperledger Fabric 3.0, the final result of the old Hyperledger Foundation, moving out to make a name for itself.
It is a blockchain platform that enables decentralized services at the enterprise level. By managing data and transactions in a decentralized way (on different computers or nodes) in blocks, no single actor can modify the entire system at once. It is like an immutable ledger that records all transactions, after which they cannot be changed or deleted. This makes manipulation or fraud much more difficult.
Byzantine Failure
This latest version of Hyperledger Fabric has performance improvements and security upgrades aimed at enterprise blockchain deployments. Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT)-consensus via the SmartBFT protocol allows systems to continue functioning even if some nodes stop working or are out of service due to malicious activity. (Called a ‘Byzantine Failure’). The SmartBFT ordering service processes transactions on all nodes in the system in the same order. This should maintain the integrity and consistency of the decentralized system.
“Support for Byzantine Fault Tolerance completes one of the early visions for Hyperledger Fabric’s unique execute-order-validate modular architecture,” stated David Enyeart, Hyperledger Fabric Maintainer and Release Manager at IBM in a statement. IBM was one of the major contributors to original Hyperledger Foundation in 2015. “While peer nodes have always executed and validated transactions in a decentralized fashion, the new support enables various network participants to provide ordering service nodes without having to place trust in any single organization.”
Eight years of work brought together
The Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust welcomed 17 different projects at its inception. This included Hyperledger Fabric 3.0 and Trust Over IP, a framework/standard for creating digital identities. It brings together more than eight years of work done under the banner of previous projects and foundations that have now reached (near) maturity.
More than a hundred founding members have signed on. Thes include Accenture, DTCC, Hitachi and the recently joined Hedera, which has contributed its entire codebase to the project. Other members include Polygon, Wanchain and Tata Consultancy Services.
Within the Linux Foundation ecosystem, experimentation with decentralized technology is also taking place within the Decentralized Trust Labs. The organisation noted that this project has grown considerably and now houses more than 50 code bases. These include new contributions such as Signare, a solution for digital signage. Another one is Zeto, a privacy preservation toolkit that uses Zero Knowledge Proofs. This provides a way for one party to prove to another the authenticity of something without revealing the underlying data.
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