Chris Ferris, Chair of Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee, CTO Open Technology, IBM and Jonathan Levi, nominated release manager of Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, creator of HACERA

Today, we are pleased to announce Hyperledger Fabric 1.0.0 is now available! But what does the 1.0 designation really mean?

This is a huge milestone for the community. 159 engineers from 27 organizations contributed to Hyperledger Fabric and 57 engineers, writers and testers contributed to the post-beta cleanup effort. It is amazing to see what this highly collaborative community with more than 145 members has achieved in a little over a year. Just 16 months ago, Hyperledger Fabric became the first of the now eight Hyperledger projects to be incubated. Hyperledger Fabric was also the first of the Hyperledger projects to exit incubation to “Active” status in March, after a year in incubation.

The efforts around Hyperledger Fabric have grown into a true, vibrant community including engineers from: Arxan, Cloudsoft, CLS, d20 Technical Services, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Digital Asset, Fujitsu, GE, Gemalto, HACERA, Hitachi, Huawei Technologies, Hyperchain, ImpactChoice, IT People, Knoldus, The Linux Foundation, Netease, Passkit, State Street Bank, SecureKey, IBM, SAP, Thoughtworks and Wanda Group. There were also contributions from 35 unaffiliated individuals. In total, 159 developers have contributed to Hyperledger Fabric.

Along the way, we published two developer preview releases, and we learned a lot from the feedback from the many users developing proofs of concept/technology built using those releases. With that important feedback, we undertook a significant refactoring of the architecture and re-wrote much of the code, as you can see with the visualization of the commit history.

No open source project is ever “done,” and the same can be said for Hyperledger Fabric. There’s much that we want to do, including improve delivery of a Byzantine Fault Tolerant orderer capability, explore integration with other Hyperledger projects such as Sawtooth, Iroha, Indy and Burrow, add support for Java and other chaincode development languages, deliver additional SDKs for Go and Python, provide a recipe(s) for deployment to Kubernetes, deliver proper installers for the various development platforms, and much, much more.

We also have more work to do on performance and of course we have plans to add more comprehensive performance, scale and chaotic testing to our continuous integration pipeline to continue to add to the robustness of the platform.

However, the project’s maintainers felt that the time was ripe to deliver a robust initial major release with the objective of allowing consumers and vendors of technology based on Hyperledger Fabric to advance to the next stage: production deployment and operations.

Over the past two months, we locked down feature development and focused on static and dynamic security scanning and linting, testing, reducing technical debt and fixing defects. We increased the unit test coverage by 70% and continue to automate our manual SVT integration tests. We have honed our release process by releasing four interim releases (alpha, alpha2, beta, and rc1) and with each, we have been taking user feedback and worked to improve our documentation and initial UX.

So, is it soup yet? We think so, and we’d love for you to give Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 a try. Are we done? Not at all. There’s still much to be done on the journey to delivering on the promise of blockchain in the enterprise. However, to drive the continuous improvement, we need your feedback. Why not join us on this exciting journey to transform how the industry thinks about business network transactions!