Phoenix, AZ
What a great place for an early spring conference! The weather was perfect, the city was beautiful and the people were amazing. We were also able to take in a Suns game against the defending NBA champs, the Toronto Raptors.
Concerns over the rapidly progressing coronavirus (COVID-19) may have slightly dampened the attendance numbers, but it didn’t dampen the enthusiasm. Attendees replaced handshakes for elbow bumps and lots of hand sanitizer while taking in the latest innovations at the conference.
In no particular order, here are our Top Three Takeaways from the recent Hyperledger Global Forum:
Fabric has become the dominant permissioned blockchain for enterprise
No two companies have made greater inroads towards the development and build-out of enterprise blockchain networks than IBM and Accenture. And both were ever-present on the technical and business tracks discussing the latest findings from their global implementations.
The consistent theme we heard from attendees is that Fabric continues to deliver on its core promise of modularity and flexibility. So it’s only natural that it continues to be the go-to choice for new enterprise projects. With the recent release of Fabric 2.0, it is clear Hyperledger is focused on maintaining its competitive advantage.
As one person said (who didn’t want to quoted directly)… “it’s a virtuous cycle, the more projects that leverage Fabric, the more the community gets exposure to real world use cases and has the ability to develop and harden those solutions.”
Interoperability is still key to success and the community is strong
And yet, there were plenty of presenters talking about the need for interoperability between frameworks, identity solutions, and legacy business systems.
For the development community, this means opportunity to provide tools and resources for connecting networks built on other frameworks. Also, opportunities to stay flexible within the design and implementation of specific Fabric networks to ensure future optionality.
For the business community, interoperability means continued freedom. Freedom to move forward without fear of being “locked-in.” Or investing development resources and time on a closed framework. It also means flexibility to accommodate future network partners which will become critical as networks mature and business ecosystems gravitate towards blockchain-enabled solutions.
Hyperledger Besu (or “Ethereum on Fabric”) Has Arrived
The PegaSys team was there to provide an overview of Hyperledger Besu and help usher in a new era of Ethereum on Fabric. The team started focusing on Besu’s development a few years ago when they saw very little focus on Ethereum from within the Hyperledger community. From their perspective, Fabric had a strong foothold in the enterprise community. Ethereum, on the other hand, offered amazing access to perhaps the world’s largest development community.
What seemed like a natural alliance proved difficult at times. In fact, there was discord among the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee about the Besu project. Even our own CEO had to step in to help preach inclusion in order to provide a path towards developing the best possible Ethereum-based framework.
And they have come a long way! PegaSys’s Maryam Mahjoub made the case for Ethereum for Enterprise: the ability to leverage Ethereum’s ecosystem and mainnet, quickly deploy your own network, and benefit from native tokenization.
The Kaleido team was also at HGF to demonstrate their solution which helps projects stand up networks in minutes.
We’re looking forward to seeing what sort of traction the Besu team is able to get in the coming 12 months!
Token capabilities with DAML on Fabric might be the silver-bullet for Financial Applications
Ok, we threw this one in here… because this was our main focus heading into the conference. But we think it’s fair to say our live demo impressed a lot of folks! We demonstrated the ability to issue/create, allocate and exchange tokens on an “out of the box” implementation of Fabric. The tokens were managed by a DAML-based smart contract, making the whole implementation portable by construction.
Most importantly, we did not modify a single line of code in Fabric to make it happen! The live demonstration proves companies – right now – can adopt the utility and flexibility of tokens. It also demonstrates that companies can manage their tokens through smart contracts implemented through DAML-on-Fabric smart contracts. DAML-on-Fabric is a solution we’ve been developing in partnership with Digital Asset for most of 2019.
Assets represented by tokens. logic was managed by DAML app, on a highly secure and scalable enterprise framework. Throw in some transaction level privacy and other key features from HACERA and you have the ultimate, enterprise-grade application, which can be seamlessly deployed even in highly-regulated environments.
Click here to see the live demo we presented at HGF.
Reach out over here to contact us and let us know if you have any questions.
