The Hyperledger Foundation and the EBA are working together to accelerate the development and adoption of business blockchain technologies throughout Europe. We spoke with the Hyperledger Foundation’s Executive Director Daniela Barbosa about goals, challenges and the benefits of working together in networks of networks.
🎤 Daniela, tell us a little more about the Hyperledger Foundation. What is unique about it and what are your goals for the coming years?
Hyperledger Foundation is a community and member-driven, not-for-profit organization that fosters the global development of enterprise-grade open source blockchain and related technologies. We host the world’s largest ecosystem focused on the open development of these technologies. The size and scale of our community and our commitment to collaboratively developing the foundation technologies for decentralized networks, transactions and trust set us apart.
Our mission is to accelerate the development and deployment of Hyperledger technologies with the aim of transforming existing markets and creating new ones.
🎤 Which current innovations do you think will impact the blockchain and DLT landscape the most in the long term?
The market and technology are both maturing quickly so there are critical developments happening on many fronts, including:
- Advancements in interoperability to support multi-chain solutions and hybrid networks
- Verifiable credentials as they are critical to digital identity as well as payments and transactions
- New tokenization models that hold the promise for vastly more efficient and cost effective ways to transfer of assets, make payments and complete other financial task
🎤 Which benefits do you see in cooperating with the European Blockchain Association?
We are well down the path to a world with a network of networks and not one network to rule them all, so collaboration and standardization are key. At our core, we are a community of developers looking to create open platforms and so want to work with others leading the charge for openness and standards.
🎤 A main goal for the cooperation is to foster standardization and interoperability. What are the challenges in this area and how do you want to address them?
Hyperledger Foundation has long maintained there will not be one blockchain to rule them all. It will take a mix of blockchains and blockchain-related technologies to maximize the value of distributed ledgers, smart contracts, digital assets and self-sovereign identity between businesses, across industries and around the world. Our position is that open source and open development create common and even shared building blocks for distributed networks and solutions. We encourage cross-industry collaboration with a large and diverse community of contributors to ensure good governance, software stability and open platforms. We have multiple projects and labs, including Hyperledger Cacti and Hyperledger FireFly, working collectively to tackle interoperability challenges.
🎤 What challenges do you foresee for widespread adoption of blockchain technology?
A: The biggest pitfalls are around balancing transparency and true decentralization with data privacy and security. This holds true whether you are building a large trade network, new financial instruments or digital identity tools. Establishing good governance and using open platforms and industry standards ensures that there’s no over reliance on any centralized party. Private and public sector participation in open source communities like Hyperledger Foundation ensures that. The power of blockchain technology lies in recording or verifying a transaction or identity over a network hardened by distributed trust. Assuring organizations and individuals that they can participate in such networks to validate critical tasks and transactions without seeding control of sensitive information will go a long way towards accelerating adoption.