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In the beginning, Hyperledger was a diverse collection of projects clustered around the idea of Multi-Party Systems, each with its own visions and implementation for DLT or Blockchain frameworks. In those early days, the various working groups in Hyperledger were naturally focused on technical DLT issues, such as the Architecture WG, Identity WG, Performance and Scale WG. As the field matured, more projects were approved that implemented utilities which brought together the different DLT frameworks such as interoperability, focused on foundational concepts such as Digital Identity and Digital Wallets.
Then came the Special Interest Groups (SIG’s) which were focused on specific business areas such as Trade Finance (TF), Supply Chain (SC), Healthcare (H), Telecomm (T), and Capital Markets (CM). These groups evolved separately and went through their own independent cycles of growth. These SIGS regularly hosted presentations about their industries and business domains and developed leveraged open source software based on their needsprotocols and software to deliver solutions overcoming their respective challenges.
Gradually, these groups began to come together organically without any top-level directionindividual SIGs came together organically and dynamically. For example, the Public Sector SIG expressed the will to collaborate with Capital Markets, while the Climate Action and Accounting SIG bootstrapped its carbon emissions trading project in Hyperledger Labs from the eThaler digital central bank currency project of the Capital Markets SIG. Vipin Bharathan of the Capital Markets SIG had written an article on Trade Finance Securitization which had appeared in Medium and also on TF Global. Then, research led jointly by the Capital Markets and Trade Finance SIG’s in 2020 produced an exhaustive and comprehensive picture of the Chinese blockchain infrastructure for Trade and Trade Finance by Eugenio Reggianini.
On March 24, 2021, Hyperledger Trade Finance and Capital Markets SIGs met formally for the very first time to plan collaboration in earnest, on in a meeting that featured a speech by Mario Reichel of PPI AG, titled “The beauty of ISO 20022 ''. The That meeting sparked an inner debate within the Trade Finance SIG about how different SIGs in the Hyperledger ecosystem could collaborate. Perhaps it is natural that large scale collaboration started this way, since trade finance has always been a hybrid industry, so intimately connected with many other branches of human activity. Indeed, trade finance could even be said to be the birthplace of money.
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Finally, as the world recovers from the turmoil caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, members of the Trade Finance SIG, which began in March 2020, felt strongly that solutions for going green and sustainable could unite the entire Hyperledger ecosystem. As an opens ource open source community, we are uniquely able to combine together and orchestrate action for giving an answer to the world’s most urgent problems.
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Following up on these ideas, the Trade Finance SIG has brought together several other Hyperledger SIG’s to create a Cross-SIG Collaboration Working Group to break the silos through intentional collaboration and start a convergence of the Hyperledger ecosystem and DLT’s for addressing large-scale real world problems. This new Working Group echoes the goal of the Linux Foundation itself: “Unlocking the value of shared technology. Innovation comes from everywhere; we do help companies and developers in identifying and contributing to the projects that matter. Working together, the Open Source Community is addressing the challenges of industry and technology for the benefit of society. Code is power. Community is strength. We are one.” It seeks to become a “Ledgers of human interactions” architected like Hyperledger Fabric, with a “consortium,” “Network Configurations”, and “Channel Configuration.”
The “pillars” “principles” of the new Working Group are:
- Identify and contribute
- Working together
- heterogeneous expertise
- Identify and address cross industry/SIGs challenges
- Defining that “Code is power”Address the challenges of industry
- Enabling Technology for the benefit of societyDefining that “Code is power”
- Affirming that “Community is strength”Once and for all stating that “We are One” and “Collaboration is the way”.
- Unify all SIGs under the Hyperledger umbrella in a collaborative way
The very first step to be undertaken should be to find in current Hyperledger SIG’s and WG’s the individuals, men and women who shall meet to share ideas and insights based on the secret behind successful enterprise blockchains: “reciprocity”, “mutuality” and collaboration”, i.e. an enhanced exchange of ideas. Two types of individuals should become focal points of this new group:
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The open source approach of the group will engage the community to collaborate on projects, and its initial members will act as a sort of “switchboard” for connecting people who want to connect with other people, on both use cases, coding, business etc..
The Working Group is already planning several use cases involving green trade finance. To get involved, join the first active call for the group at 1800 6:00 PM CEST / 9:00 AM PST at the community calendar or follow its new wiki page to see upcoming developments and projects. The Working Group asks new participants to think about the following topics:
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Many practitioners in the field of distributed ledger technologies call it “Multi Party Systems”. This is because the various parties mutualize their source of truth using a shared immutable ledger. In this document we explore the uniqueness of the Hyperledger project and propose the intentional convergence through breaking the silos between the various Hyperledger Special Interest Groups and Hyperledger Working Groups because Hyperledger is a System of Multiparty Systems. An exploration of the history of Hyperledger reveals that the natural evolution of its constituent parts leads us toward breaking down the silos. To find a common ground of understanding on carrying out technical and business operation practices helps enormously and we, HL TF-SIG firmly believe that this experience, although quite new, should replicated throughout the whole Hyperledger community, namely through all the SIGs and WGs, gathering all of them periodically and regularly in a common virtual playground.
To find a common ground of understanding on carrying out technical and business operation practices helps enormously and we, HL TF-SIG firmly believe that this experience, although quite new, should replicated throughout the whole Hyperledger community, namely through all the SIGs and WGs, gathering all of them periodically and regularly in a common virtual playground.Behind technology, behind groups are individuals, men and women.
Meeting among the chairperson and the main members of each SIG and WG, Understanding the critical points, those that led to failure could the point to start from for future success, will in our opinion end up creating a decentralized, distributed bulk of knowledge, of experiences (positive or negative, failures or successes) to treasure and learn from. It'll be something like setting up “governance rules” among SIGs and WGs.
We, as promoters of this initiative,