Hyperledger welcomes Ethereum Foundation, Microsoft, and others to new identity project

Hyperledger announced it has accepted eight new members and launched a new project focusing on new infrastructure for decentralized identity, including the Ethereum Foundation and Microsoft.

"The mix of blue chip technology companies, international organizations, logistics and manufacturing players and academia that have joined us from point around the world show the widespread interest and investment in open source enterprise blockchain technologies. This broad-based involvement is what drives our expanding portfolio of open source projects, which are fully conceived, developed and advanced by the ever-growing Hyperledger community."

Hyperledger Aries is the second project to spin off from Hyperledger Indy after Ursa.

Ursa provides a library of advanced cryptographic operations consolidated from other Hyperledger projects and Aries continues the work of Indy to provide a protocol for decentralized identity.

"Provide code for peer-to-peer interaction, secrets management, verifiable information exchange, and secure messaging for different decentralized systems.Foster practical interoperability in support of ongoing standards work and extend the applicability of technologies developed within Indy beyond its current community components from the Hyperledger stack into a single, effective business solution."

"When it first began, the Hyperledger Indy project included code for all three of the lower layersThis was very powerful, but also somewhat overwhelming for new developers. And it gave the impression that layers 2 and 3 were tied to the Hyperledger Indy permissioned blockchain code at layer 1.".

"Separating out layer 2 and 3 code into a new independent project brings clarity to the fact that the goal of this four-layer stack is universal interoperability among all SSI ledgers, agents, wallets, verifiable credentials, and governance frameworks."

Hyperledger is both a collaborative effort to develop cross-industry, open source software and a collection of frameworks and tools for developing blockchain applications for the enterprise.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the venture currently consists of 13 projects, including the recently-announced Hyperledger Aries.

Pre-approved non-profits, open source projects, and government entities can join Hyperledger as associate members free of charge.