Blockchain moves beyond its ‘moonshot’ phase
Bank executives today who want to stay abreast of new technologies are compelled to wade through a swamp of buzzwords, none buzzier than “blockchain.”
Such is the proliferation of projects—public, permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum’s, which anyone can use, alongside private, “permissioned” blockchains such as R3’s Corda—and competing schools of thought, each with its loud partisans competing for mindshare at conferences and on social media, that one could be forgiven for feeling lost.
Worse, it can seem as if the word “blockchain” itself risks becoming little more than fairy dust for big corporations to sprinkle on tired old processes to make them sound new and fresh.
Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Project, which seeks to establish common standards for blockchain technology, isn’t concerned. Blockchain projects are evolving rapidly—dozens of companies are now using the distributed ledger network Corda, for instance—and, for now, Behlendorf would rather see a thousand flowers bloom than try to reap the harvest too early.
Hyperledger is distinct in being embedded within the nonprofit Linux Foundation, which has about 1,000 corporate members. Hyperledger itself has about 170 direct partners, including IBM and the Spanish banking group BBVA, funding its efforts to develop blockchain technology on which these companies can then build products and services.
American Banker recently spoke with Behlendorf to learn more about what sets Hyperledger apart, what he thinks success would entail and how the consortium’s efforts to roll out production-ready software are going. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
How is Hyperledger different from the other consortia and coalitions that are out there today?
BRIAN BEHLENDORF: We’re a part of the Linux Foundation, which has been around for 15 years, acting as the nexus point for development of the Linux operating system, providing governance for both developers and vendors—everybody from the phone markers, to Dell and HP and Oracle and IBM, to people who put it in cars now. The model was: Be a consortium, take funding from these companies in the form of memberships and then fund all the things that enterprises need from a software initiative except for writing the code, because you depend upon the developers in the open source community to write the code. And they’ll show up—some of them from those vendors, but some of them from other places in the public. If there’s a 15-year-old kid with a good idea and clear communication skills who can work on a team, he should be able to contribute, all the way up to being a core member of the project.
Hyperledger came about when people were saying this model seems to work and it seems to be replicable, and it could solve what seemed to be a problem, especially at that time, in the bitcoin community, where you had the developers at war with each other, the vendors at war with each other.
How do you see Hyperledger in relation to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
In 1969, we went to the moon. We put Americans in a capsule and landed and brought them home. Great. We didn’t end up doing much there, because as it turns out, there’s not really a lot commercially you can do on the moon, but the fact that we got rockets that could put big, big systems into space meant we could put things into orbit—and you put a camera up there, you put a radio antenna up there, you put all sorts of things in space and suddenly you have a lot of commercial activity. If Ethereum and bitcoin are the moonshot, we’re the rocket ship that makes this commercially usable for lots and lots of other activities that might not have been anticipated when your goal was “Get to the moon.”
So that’s the metaphor.
