As interest in blockchain/distributed ledger technologies grew in recent years, a number of powerful industry consortia have emerged. Two of the most prominent are Hyperledger, which is hosted at the Apache Software Foundation, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. (The latter was only formed in February, but Ethereum already had a strong developer community.)
Now an important milestone has been reached between the Ethereum community and Hyperledger, which counts more than 100 members and is a major player in blockchain. Hyperledger project head Brian Behlendorf made the announcement in a blog post:
[T]he Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) approved a proposal submitted by engineers at Monax and Intel, to incubate the community’s first Ethereum derived project – Burrow, a permissionable smart contract machine.
The Burrow project originated with Monax as eris-db, and has been open source since December 2014. The project has been relicensed to Apache Software License 2.0, in accordance with the Hyperledger governance requirements.
First, and foremost, having an Ethereum derived project under the Hyperledger umbrella should send a strong message that any positioning of the Hyperledger and Ethereum communities as competitive is incorrect.
Apart from that, there remain many technical challenges to solve with blockchain, and it makes sense for the community at large to collaborate in the name of solving them with production-ready code faster, Behlendorf wrote.
An Apache-licensed Ethereum Virtual Machine also means that the variety of distributed ledger falling under the Hyperledger banner, such as Sawtooth Lake and Fabric, can work on integrating EVM, he added:
I know that many in the community have been looking forward to (and working towards!) this day. I think it will mark an important point in Hyperledger’s (and blockchain) history.
That isn't hyperbole, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"One aspect that is part of the definition of interactive digital markets is that they consist of an ecosystem of trading enterprises, hence the requirement for a commercial ‘settlement’ system, and the hope that blockchain technology will be able to provide this," he says. "Though it is early days in the progress towards this goal, the importance of Hyperledger and Ethereum as major initiatives is understood. Therefore, this announcement of the two working in tandem introduces an important new impetus."
The addition of Monax to Hyperledger is a welcome measure, and could spark even more collaboration between the communities. Earlier this year, a proposal to relicense the Ethereum C++ client under the ASF's Apache 2.0 license and away from the more restrictive GPLv3 failed after resistance from some members of the Ethereum community. The addition of Monax and Burrow to Hyperledger could serve as a test bed for collaboration and thus a potential motivator for broader integration between Hyperledger and Ethereum in the future.
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