 Okay. Well, why don't we begin? Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Bellendorf. I'm executive director of Hyperledger. And I'm really glad to be kicking off a five week series of panels and conversations to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Hyperledger project. In fact, December 12th, I'm sorry, December 17th, 2015 was the date of the first press release that went out to everybody announcing the formation of the Hyperledger project. And in that time, a lot of amazing things have happened and we've really become a mature and interesting project. And so we really wanted to reflect the broad community that we pulled together and said, and so we put together a series of panels to explore the different facets of those. The first panel actually starts tomorrow at about the same time. And it'll just kind of be a retrospective of the first five years by a couple of our core participants who've been with the project since the beginning. So please join us for that. We will drop the link to the full series and post on the website in chat as well as it's on the Hyperledger website. But to start off, we thought it would be fun to get a little bit nostalgic, but but also think a bit about the future by having a real casual fireside conversation and, you know, we, what one of the best one of the real joys of being on this project has been connecting journalists and reporters and others in the media industry who have been very hungry to understand not only how the technology works, but what, what can we really accomplish with it. And very few of those have approached the level of rigor and and finesse and nuance that Stella has, Michael. I thank you for joining us here today. And yeah, let's talk about the last five years of Hyperledger. First off, could you tell us a bit more about kind of yourself and and your your context with your with with the project. I mean, I'm excited that Enterprise blockchain has survived five years and grown a lot. I did my first Bitcoin article back in 2011, believe it or not. And in 2015 I was still begging my editors to let me write about cryptocurrency I still had to take every story that I wanted to write and ask for permission. I was starting to get a little bit more acceptable and media outlets. And then in December 2015. I was first introduced to Hyperledger on a story at one of our competitors whose name shall not be mentioned. But they did a great coverage of what was called the open ledger project briefly, and then had sort of evolved into hyper ledger. It really changed gears that day and I stopped when I was working on and I started writing about this new group. And I've been writing about it in a lot of ways, ever since. But I think it's a cool backstory because, you know, I know where I was at that moment but I think it's really interesting to know where were you at that moment. Let's get things started just by talking a little bit about what was Brian Bielendorf doing on December 17, 2015. Yeah, so I was, let me tell just a little bit about my background that led me to that point. Because there's a little bit of an anomaly, I guess when you look at the what I've done in my career. So I was born in a small town called Burbank. No, I'm just kidding. As most people know I didn't know that far back, but I've been involved for 25 years in one way or another with open technologies right with trying to make the web grow and work and through the Apache project which became the Apache Software Foundation, setting up really the first consortium around and open source around, sorry, the first nonprofit around open source software right, but still doing that from a commercial point of view. Starting a couple of different companies and then deciding I wanted to really focus on what's the social impact of open source technology and the way that we can build these information systems that are more cooperative. And so I kind of left the company behind started joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. And so I started working with groups and went out and traveled quite a bit, and then started working on a presidential campaign, the Obama campaign started serving at the White House in 2009 and 10. And then that led up to being CTO for the World Economic Forum. And, and, you know, and through all that trying to find ways for technology to seep into these conversations about how the world worked and how it should work and being somewhat of an idealist. So today I want to make the world more fair and more, more just, but also a pragmatist let's, how do we do that today, what are the IT challenges today that can lead to that right how do we make room for people to be able to make make money in that. And after that kind of career, I got a little bit exhausted, and I kind of needed to take a break but then wanted to see what life was like in a very different angle so a friend was starting a venture capital firm called Mithril so said I could park myself there for a while and let's talk about the next. Like to mention the name of that friend. Well, it was a Jay Ryan, who was a partner at Mithril. And Peter teal is another partner there as well so as briefly part of the teal empire. And, you know, in addition to looking at things like nuclear fusion and robotic surgery and all these other really cool domains, certainly paid attention to what was emerging out of the Bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem had lots and lots of pitches to invest early in the companies around that couldn't really invest the firms, the funds money and directly into the currencies. But I certainly paid attention to what was going on and that was super skeptical. I was super. It was hard to separate out the token promoters and the flyby nights from from the real substance, and also unclear where the defensible value is going to be created So when you first read an article or were otherwise introduced to hyper ledger and what was your first reaction. So my first reaction and this was me sitting there as a managing director at Mithril kind of evaluating technologies and learning a lot about blockchain and Bitcoin was. Okay, this is where that the ability to form a distributed ledger the ability for all parties to be able to write to it and verify the integrity of those transactions. And I actually met up with, you know, the business realities of the problems that it could solve right because, even before that point people have been talking about, I, you know, land titles and those sorts of things but it got very much confused with burning CPU power and speculative sort of thing and I saw here a group of people saying, No, there's more prosaic ways of solving these kinds of challenges. And it doesn't mean disrupt all the things it doesn't mean throw away the banks, you know, get rid of the regulators have this kind of crypto anarchist kind of point of view that instead there's a way to improve the systems of the world. Rather than, you know, kind of trying to throw them all away and try to start over. And so that appealed to me a bit and I reached out to my friend Jim Zemlin, who had been running the Linux Foundation since very early on and asked is there a way I can help with this. He said, Well, you know, that, why don't you show up at a couple of meetings. I, there were some face to face gatherings in New York City. I'm going to talk to Morgan and other hosted by DTCC, where the technologists were coming together to talk about how do we kind of blend our different, you know, the different things that we've built in kind of an R&D setting IBM, they actually I think IBM's project was called open ledger at first with what digital asset had been building with, including a couple of early Bitcoin companies and even consensus was there early on and so attended a few of those meetings watch them. Yep. Let's talk about what the with that early incarnation look like. And so rephrase that what did it look like as you started getting involved so sort of metaphorically and maybe even literally walking into the offices for the very first time. So what was the lay of the land there, and what were your personal hopes for what the open ledger project now hyper ledger project could accomplish. So it was pretty clear early on was that there were in still are but but even clear in 2015, there are legitimately a lot of different ways to build a distributed ledger system. There are differences of opinion on everything from consensus mechanisms to the right way to run smart contracts to, I, I, you know, the configuration of them and that the interfaces they expose the outside world. I think it came pretty important to us to really, you know, trying to figure out what's the balancing act there between me meeting everybody's interest and what and goals with one piece of software versus potentially other approaches and my, my experience on open source had been that it's really hard to scale an open source project to meet everybody's needs off of one code base that that often in complex environments which even in 2015 blockchain had already become. I having these different, I different work streams these different ideas and one melting pot was going to be a huge challenge, and there was a certain scalability of the development process that we needed to figure out that that the communities were already shaping against because. There is only one Linux kernel right I mean there's this true that there was, you know, you were growing up. You were helping grow hyper ledger in this environment, where there was a strong precedent at the Linux foundation for a single code base. Was the original vision was with the original vision of hyper ledger that it would be a single code base. There are some parties that joined that that said, yeah, I would say actually even most of the ones in the early on, most of the participants early on said, you know, here's this code base IBM had made a lot of progress on. There were some good ideas and what digital asset that had been building that could be brought in and a few others. Let's let's see if we can piece these together into something whole and Intel had also been working on their own kind of direction and brought it in and it wasn't really clear that there's a nice way to blend those two efforts there were some strong not only architectural and programming language differences you know the, the fabric team had been really focused on go as the programming language in 2015 it seemed like the right way to build services architecture still still seems really interesting in that front, whereas a lot of sawtooth sawtooth lake as it was called at the time had been written in Python, had a very different architecture for when you forge consensus was more closely associated with Nakamoto consensus even though it used proof of elapsed time and some other functionality to avoid the proof of work issue. Just very differences of point of view. And, and so when I joined full time in June of 2016. So I've been watching I've been watching this kind of community advising some folks trying to say to have some patience, you know you can always work out these technical issues later on. I realized that the very first thing that I had to do as executive director was provide some clarity as to whether we were going to be about one code base or needed to make room for these other ideas. And I use that as the pretext to God and talk to all the companies that it had been signed on as members and introduce myself and say guess what first question of the day is, what do we do about this right. Is there room out there, and, and certainly meanwhile the the public blockchain community was continuing to innovate that's where you started to see the birth of Neo and EOS and others and and there was this kind of Cambrian explosion both on the public blockchain side and on others doing permission blockchains as well. And that was about the same year 2016 you saw a couple of variants of Ethereum that were private launched right and others and they just seem to me that this early days, what was their actual demand or was there more of an instinct that it that this technology should be applicable in other ways than just issuing digital assets. Were you sort of like building and hoping that people would come or were there people knocking at the door saying oh my God please build this in the early days. Well, I think there was a clear sense that there were use cases beyond digital assets that made sense that the point of having, you know, chain code was to automate a whole bunch of business processes that could make, you know that supply chain traceability was was pretty really there. I that it's simply having a common directory service that wasn't rooted at any one particular organization but was shared. But the way to automate certain business processes I mean all all that was was a clear part of the goal from the beginning. What I think, but it certainly had to prove itself. The concept of enterprise blockchain had to prove itself in the public mind. There wasn't a lot of demand yet for people to go. I've got this problem and I know blockchain can solve it for me so we have to build something. That also meant that as an open source project, you know, we did, we weren't stepping into a mature space and just kind of, you know, I kind of reducing down 100 different variants into one common core. I mean if you think about where Linux was in 1991, you know, operating systems Unix operating systems had existed for 2530 years at that point. The kernel, the kernel was intended to be a clone of with slight variations off of other Unix platforms right so we weren't in that spot with enterprise blockchain in 2015. It was still a pretty young space and, and so when I went out and talked to members about do we want to be around a common core or distributed or have a couple of different options here. The sentiment was it was probably worth mapping the landscape, you know, to try to make sure that you know there's there's a couple of different approaches that are tried and that let let then let the market decide which one of those seems the most viable seems the most interesting. Let the teams kind of cooperate and then kind of compete at the same time. The goal for Hyperledger as an overall organization should be to foster the best kind of environment for for building these kinds of technologies and encouraging them to talk to each other. And that's about the time we dropped the project name and just went with Hyperledger as a community to help make it clear we're a collection of projects and then eventually adopted the greenhouse metaphor to help people further understand. We're building some things here some of which will be able to harvest some of which might not turn out the way we briefly go with an umbrella metaphor if I remember correctly. Well, and I used to hear as well I mean that's perhaps the more common term for things like the Apache Software Foundation, which is 300 400 projects now. You know, every one of them as large or larger than the web server project which started it. Obviously GitHub has like millions of projects you don't think of it that way but umbrellas are what we do have in the Linux foundation and a couple of domains like cloud computing with the cloud native compute foundation or LF networking or all these others where there's a family of technologies under a common brand. And so that's a pattern that seems to scale pretty well because that also gives you the chance to go out and explain the technology to the world which the operating system world didn't need right which even cloud computing kind of somewhat needed but not really much but an enterprise blockchain we had. There was really nobody else making the case at a business level at a at a conceptual level for enterprise blockchain except us for the first few years. So, hyper ledger went out with a bang in December 2015 with founding members, including Accenture and Z Cisco CLS credits Deutsche Boris digital asset holdings DTCC industries which has been rebranded I believe Fujitsu I see three IBM Intel JP Morgan London stock exchange group Mitsubishi are three State Street Swift VMware and Wells Fargo. So these are these are well known company companies these are brands that got a lot of attention and I remember shortly after you joined and the first time we spoke was actually for an article I did that coined us back in 2016 sorry May I think it was a month before you officially started and we talked about some of your goals. And this was the era when any all you had to do to get a headline was join a consortium. And whether or not it was hyper ledger or our three CEV as it was called, or another sort of high profile blockchain consortium. Now we just saw like a wave of big companies, paying their membership dues or whatever it was they had to do to get involved and figure out what was going on. So, I'd love to kind of get to that point in the development of hyper ledger where there was just this explosion of interest. What was that like on the inside you know what were you seeing a lot of leaders that you were sort of having to manage too many chefs in the kitchen. One or two leaders and other people looking to follow. What was it like as we were on the outside watching just headline after headline after headline of these new big enterprises getting involved with with hyper ledger and our three and others. Right. Well, let me start kind of at a personal level which is, you know, so I had not been part of the Linux foundation until this project I joined right. And prior to that, as I mentioned I had had roles on some of these other foundations and such but only as a volunteer only as maybe a board member here and there. Never full time paid and somewhat incredulous at the idea that I could actually convince companies to commit real dollars to go and help run, not the development of the code but the air traffic control around the stewardship of that. That was the kind of thing that I'd almost always written off as one of the prices you had to pay to run an open source project was even though you're a developer even though you'd love to do nothing more than add features all day. Not only do you have to fix bugs you have to think about the politics as well. I'm really joining the Linux foundation and watching the other projects that the LF help me realize, know that there's separate and tremendous value that comes from running that that air traffic control, and that corporations realize that value, and they're willing to put those dollars in to help that happen, even if they themselves aren't writing other code, because they want to see the optionality in the market. So I make sure that if this is a technology platform they're committing to that there is a plethora of companies who support them that other people are making the same decision that this is an industry movement, a standard if you will but a standard in software form, and not just one vendor who's kind of calling the shots who might run out of money and might or otherwise leave us high and dry. And as this interest came in the immediate thing that struck me was, wait, is this is this fake like is this going to like disappear and as quickly as it started right is this driven as the as kind of a shadow of the ICO kind of movement right where companies feel like well they can't buy tokens but they can double down in this. This is driven by just a positive economy and not much more. And so we really said we have to focus on the value that we're delivering to our members in the consortium that is partly in the value of this these digital public goods that are being created, right, but also in the form of membership value as well. And, and that's when we realized that combined with the fact that enterprise blockchain was kind of the run to the letter. I mean if you remember at consensus conferences and other places you know we kind of we'd get a lot of comments here and there. People certainly love to turn to our members for booths and sponsorships and that sort of thing, but you know the highlight the keynotes the attention was almost always on the ICOs and the public ledger stuff and the currency things. So we kind of had to fight for respect and we realized we need to spend as many resources on establishing that the concept out there in a way that that allows people to see the value of it, and do that in a vendor neutral way or or really a community of partners together. And that became kind of key for us and so as I built the staff, I kind of evenly built them on both sides one on the community management side for the developer communities coming together and the other on marketing and communication and making sure people understood what we were building. And I think that really paid off well. And we've been able to keep a lot of those, those members who are just users of blockchain technology aren't necessarily contributors and keep them as members of hyperledger I think because of that value that we're creating. Out of the gate there. And I think to some degree still today. Enterprise blockchain organizations like hyperledger are viewed by some as sort of anti crypto like you know it's it's their their permission less your permissioned. And in the early days, there was even like talk about how enterprises were co opting this technology that was made in basements by hackers you know trying to make the world a better place. And I think it's not a surprise that going to those events, you know, at least in the early days you were kind of off in the corner. I think that I love a story that you've told where there was some possible synergy there where one of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies biggest haters, Nouriel Rubini, you had a conversation with. And I don't know if I don't read too much into this but perhaps it may be a bit of an opportunity to gain some some support for permissioned blockchain that he was reluctant to give to public blockchains. Tell me a little bit about your interaction with Nouriel and how that I thought it would I mean I saw him at a reception at Davos as these conversations these things, I guess start but where he had been delivering all week kind of his anti cryptocurrency and he's not wrong on some of them but but also I mean he's Dr doom is his kind of a nickname for a reason right he's he tends to be very much the critic of technologies and I walked up and said, you know, there's an angle to these technologies that is creating value for a large number of companies out there now and a way that they're using the tech, separate from proof of work which has been part of his criticism and frankly mine and a lot of people's right, and separate from the speculative nature in that space, and he just didn't want to hear, you know, and didn't, you know was like, looking around for anybody else you could have a conversation with. And I was like, alright fine maybe someday. Nevertheless, nevertheless, there was a point in the future when public blockchains would start to have a bit of a day within hyper ledger so tell me a little bit about what that looked like behind the scenes. Sure. First of all, what was the first public blockchain to sort of officially touch the hyper ledger work. And sort of what was the, what was the politicking behind the scenes that was going on there. Yeah. Pretty early on, I recognize that we needed to have something more intelligent than hey we're the non crypto as I remember the non, you know, scammy side or whatever. Because I also knew that there were smart people I respected who were spending a lot of their time and energy and attention on Bitcoin and Ethereum and they wouldn't do that if there wasn't something real there I mean. The very first business trip I took wearing hyper ledger hat was to the, I was to a conference in Shanghai, that was the second Ethereum dev con, as well as an enterprise blockchain event. And it was kind of there for the whole week and so met Vitalik there met Joe met a lot of the other personalities in the Ethereum ecosystem and spend a fair bit of time reading their technology documents seeing how they work as a community and having a lot of respect for that. It was different from the impression I got from the Bitcoin crowd. Alright, and I said, look, I'm not certain that they are the ones who have all this figured out and there are very clear limitations to the use of what they were talking about building for enterprises where there was from transaction volume or simply data residency requirements or a separation of concerns that you always want in in security settings so. But I said I wanted I want to understand the space on the keep keep a communication open and see if there's any potential application for for us and was actually the first conversation was working with a group, led by Bob summer will who is working for the at some point around potentially bringing the C++ port of the Ethereum client to into hyper ledger and potentially allow it to talk other consensus mechanisms that could be used on permission settings but also in permissionless as well. And got very close, it would have required a reassignment of the license because it was licensed under the LG PL and we've been pretty solid about the Apache license here and very solid I mean that's as a single license it gives us a chance to go to enterprises where you can embed this inside your products without any concern or worries. I and that's that's been really core to us, but it would have required all hundred contributors to the, to the written that C++ code base to sign their rights over and all but if you did, and I don't want to embarrass anyone too much about saying who it isn't but it was, let's just say somebody who had been paid by the Ethereum Foundation to write a lot of that code who, but kept the IP themselves and, and then decided to start a new company that perhaps view this old code is competitive. So, again, it's out there public domain I'm too much of a diplomat to throw too many people under the bus but everyone knows him and his initials are moving beyond that I, you know, but I kept the relationship warm with the foundation and and a little bit later on, Monax, which used to be called eras had data smart contract engine focused on solidity smart contracts that they were actually using with as the consensus mechanism. And they had been open source but they felt that hey there'd be some value here to having a wider audience for it and potential other collaborators so they brought it in as a project and that got a bit of pickup. I was very much focused on permission blockchain settings, but I, it's, it was all right it was like a flag in the ground and allowed us to credibly go to people and say, we're hit we have a very open mind, and we want to recognize where there's good value where there's good engineering happening out there, and, and maybe there's a way for things written for the public blockchain to also work on the on permission blockchains and back and forth maybe making this more of a spectrum than a than a dichotomy. And then finally, you know we had kept a really good relationship with consensus. And kept the door open there they were actually part of the original announcement original cohort at least when I joined and then things seem to go very, very separate, you know, in terms of public versus versus hyper ledger and then they came back around. Last year, joined as a member, in fact joined as a premier member, which is really awesome and brought into the community. So quick little side note for anyone who's paying attention wants to go do some research. There was some brief interaction with ripple in the early days that didn't really pan out to anything right, and then it kind of came back later. And so I, yes, just to finish that last thought so bezu hyper ledger bezu which is now a, both a public blockchain and a permission blockchain client full client is now a tier one project inside hyper ledger and that that kind of is now brought us back really closely with companies like ripple and our three who have also are three was part of that launch announcement ripple is very early in there as well. And ripple did bring in some technology to do kind of coordinated payments between XRP Bitcoin and and and other ledgers that we were hoping could become something more generalized hyper ledger quilt, but didn't quite get that that take off which is fine again we're a greenhouse, some of these projects will thrive others will. You know, perhaps not, but, but it's still very much alive, but ripple and our three and others, you know, part of this this early days kind of recognition of all these companies in the room, even if they all have very different ideas about our technology should have blockchain technology technology should work, cause me to also realize, we needed to be thinking about components in this space that can talk to multiple ledgers right they can be in critical to building bridges between them. So the quilt was the first attempt at that. We have a project now called hyper ledger cactus that I think is an even better interoperability play between between these kinds of networks and it already supports fabric bezu corda and quorum. It's still version zero dot three so still pretty early I don't want to oversell it. But it's something where anyone interested in an interop between permissioned blockchain networks. We'd really encouraged them to come check it out. I first got my attention about not just hyper ledger but blockchain generally speaking and open source software that it was one platform that was strengthened by competitors working together. Yeah, by the very definition there had to be multiple counterparties and the efficiencies that were only achieved if those counter parties all agreed to work together quite literally. I think that maybe naively. I thought I was among those people that was imagining a sort of Frankenstein of code that, you know, would make every developer happy and that everybody could agree to use and that would be infinite efficiency across all networks. Obviously that's not quite happening. But what I think is really interesting is that there has been a sort of consolidation of ideas in a sense where like it started off with just permissioned blockchains and then permission list blockchains kind of started to dabble and base who came out. And then on a different category, I remember coming across a white paper years ago written by IBM talking about issuing tokens on fabric. And I don't think they wanted reporters to see that because I got them on the phone and they did everything they possibly could to keep a story from happening about issuing tokens on hyper ledger fabric. So this is actually something that we're starting to see which I think is really fascinating where this ability that was sort of popularized on public blockchains and sort of didn't want to talk about on the permission blockchains that you could issue tokens is now kind of becoming a thing again. We've got I'm looking at fab token, you know, using hyper ledger fabric to issue tokens and you know founding member are three has some token abilities. Are you seeing a future where we're seeing an increase of or a merging of these two world stuff was previously only done on public blockchains happening on permission blockchains to the point where they almost start to the differences kind of blur. Sure. Well, I certainly do credit to the public blockchains for formalizing the idea of a token right you know the things like the ERC 20 definition in the Ethereum ecosystem did a lot to help people understand that these are this is a thing that can be thought of conceptually separately from the underlying ledger previous to that point, people thought there was kind of a one to one correlation between a token and a ledger, you know is the Bitcoin network or it was, you know, the EOS network or whatever. And instead it turned out I think some people realize this early on and now it's obvious with stable coins. You can have a lot of mix mix up there you could have a lot of different tokens running on Ethereum you could have tokens on permission blockchains that sort of thing and that can come around just at the time when central banks have realized this is digitizing the flow of value and the, the automation of the essential processes between central banks and the tier one banks inside of any country, as well as the the international banks that deal a lot with currency exchange and payments across borders and that sort of thing can bring a lot of operational efficiency. And even tokenizing things like securities I mean DTCC who has been a part of hyper ledger since that beginning since that first thing their goal is always to move their core transaction transaction processing systems that they use to track all the private securities and public companies securities around the world. On behalf of Wall Street banks on behalf of the security or security trading organizations out there to move that from a main frame driven kind of central database to a decentralized one. I even they were thinking, well these are these are fungible assets these are tokens right these are things that should be exchanged and we can keep the ledger clear, but, but the parties themselves should be able to move them without needing to involve this right. So, to some degree we're talking about semantics here and what people perhaps were nervous about calling tokens in 2017 and 18. I'll do that and I'll get the SEC on my shoulders to something where they can stand a little bit more separate is is a pretty welcome change because it allows us to kind of get past some of that and I think even the word blockchain does sometimes prove a barrier to talking about the deployments of things out there some some organizations use the term multi party systems to even more generically describe these these technologies and it might come back. I do. I want to just highlight the audience that there is an opportunity to post questions and the Q&A channel on the on zoom. If you'd like to start doing that now on Brian and I will keep talking for about another 10 minutes or so. And then I'll do my best to go through any questions that you have. So, can on that on that front Brian, the permission network starting to issue tokens and seeing a sort of merging of functionalities. I want to, I want to, I want to call out some code bases in the past that have said they were going to open source. There's been a lot of promise maybe to get goodwill I'm not exactly sure what it is, but permission blockchain networks that have acquired users in some cases, high profile users and I'll just throw a now I'll speak concretely here. You know, DTC sees code of choice axoni for for its implementation has said for years that it would eventually open source and they have yet to do that. And there are some other higher and lower profile code bases that have said they were going to open source but have not done so. As you look at the rate that code bases were contributed to hyper ledger in the early days and where it's at now is the window closing for these codes to open source or where we will we continue to see code open sourcing forever. So, you know the effect that Linux had on the operating system market, right, was pretty profound. I mean, during the 1990s Linux was really just establishing its footing, but it was already stepping into some some mission critical roles in the enterprise, kind of under everyone's budgetary radar. In fact, IBM did this study in 1998 where they pulled their top 100 CIO company CIOs and asked them, you know how many of you are using Linux in your enterprise and like two of them raised their hand and said they are, but then they asked line level engineering managers and an IT guys inside those 100 companies, you know, are you using Linux and like 90% of them said yes, because it was running on, you know, mail servers and file servers and DNS servers and these other things that didn't bubble up into a purchase order. So the CIO never knew about it right because it was never a budget request it was just things that the IT team went and deployed. And then, during the 2000s. That's when you started to see companies that had their own proprietary flavors of Linux, I'm sorry of Unix, start to realize that the engineering cost of supporting those efforts and the marketing costs of convincing a customer to port it and port their application to any kind of storage device. So why not tell people build this to Linux and then we'll support you on our hardware, a much easier story than than to go on their own. And you see this pattern repeat in other domains. And I mean, there were like 25 30 of these out there was an uphill battle and getting harder to do rather than those companies supporting Linux on their hardware, and Linux made it easy by having modules that you could adapt to any CPU could adapt to any kind of storage device. So we're going to build this to Linux and then we'll support you on our hardware, a much easier story than than to go on their own. And you see this pattern repeat in other domains, as that space matures, that kind of Cambrian explosion does whittle down partly through market forces but also through technologies that are more adaptable kind of winning the day over the ones that might have some differentiated value by being different. And so they're, look, there are still proprietary operating systems today, right, obviously. And there's also still proprietary embedded operating systems or server class operating systems but it's really hard today if you're a startup to introduce a new operating system and have a whole lot of unique value proposition and doing so. And if you're somebody who's had an embedded operating system today for a while you're probably considering how to port your users over to Linux and move the next step up into what Clayton Christensen called the law of conservation of interesting profits, which was as the lower tier gets disrupted gets disrupted, move up the stack and provide differentiated value up above. So there, you know, at the beginning of hyper ledger arguably we had an open door to bringing in more different kinds of ledger platforms with different points of view than fabric had and sawtooth had and and Bezu and others. But those different, the window is probably closing in so far as a lot of these other platforms don't have a uniquely different point of view. If they're, especially if they're ones that started as forks of Ethereum or speak, you know, another interesting angle on this is dammel. If your platform supports dammel and your users are on dammel the distributed asset market language which which runs perfectly fine on fabric also runs on Bezu. Why not. What's the true value that you're providing by being a different ledger underneath and and if there's none. You know, not only should you consider open sourcing it you might even just consider porting your customer base over to platforms that have better traction and moving your value prop up the stack. So I think it is interesting that obviously giving away your code is a massive business proposition I mean you have to really understand how to capitalize on that you know have to really understand the battle for brain share and users that understand your technology and you know how that can turn into revenue 10 years 20 years 30 years or 100 years from now. And it's not 100% agreed you know some people think that the seeds of open sources own failure are an open source. And that maybe you know it's better just to have 10 elite coders that know how to use your software perfectly than to have 1000 sort of dabblers or other people. It's interesting though that that regardless of the business decisions that are made. There is something that that you I think you like to call free riders. So the free rider phenomenon I think is another interesting problem that hyper ledger has had to attack that sort of helps paint the picture of what the future might or might not look like. First of all, what is a free rider. How prevalent is free rider dumb in hyper ledger. And is it something that you're worried about. So the free rider problem. I mean this is something that every open source project kind of deals with and is the other side of the coin from the fact that you know we had used licenses that give away the code very freely. And, you know, in most cases the GPL and copy left licenses aside, do not compile require any give back, even when you go off and build this into your own commercial products and sell and make money from it. You know, there's a moral basis for why I really resonate with that which is I'm much happier, giving you a gift, then I giving you a thing but then telling you you have to give me back a thing right like like it. I think for and for a lot of developers who are naturally, you know, kind of both proud of what they've built but also humble about how they've built it. And if no compulsory give back is actually also a safe space to operate from. And the presumption there is that if you're getting code for me and you start using it and building it, you're going to find a bug, you're going to need to fix that bug, and it's easier for you to get that fixed by asking me if it's the right fix and submitting it upstream to my code and then and then we start working on this together right. That's the idealistic take, and it's the basis of Apache it's the basis of all these other communities out there. And even if only a tenth of the companies who get value drives something back. It's a numbers game, your hope is that enough people adopt it. The one tenth of those will feed back in. And that's certainly the case in things like cloud computing where I mean every company doing enterprise software or deploying anything is using containers they're using the cloud so naturally one tenth of those or even a hundred of those is going to be a massive contributor community. The blockchain community is still pretty small. It's still, you know, describable on the order of thousands of core developers across projects rather than 10s or hundreds are thousands of active developers I'd say. And so on each of our projects, you know they range from having, you know, 10 to 20 kind of pretty active full time developers to one. Right. And there's a risk when it gets too small that those projects, they might be interesting and thrive thriving, but they might not be resilient, you know if that one person has to be reassigned, or even hit gets it by a bus you know that we called the bus factor and open source projects that there's a risk that project might you might not see other developers rise up to become core maintainers in that code. And in one case with hyper ledger composer, the community made a very difficult decision which was, here's a project that had a lot of active users, but the core developers, who did all work for IBM so we'll grant that. But the core developers said, you know, this was designed to be a prototyping tool, but most of the users out there because they liked it have turned it into or tried to use it as an authoring tool for production networks, and kind of a way to not have to get into the code and that wasn't their intent. And they said we'd rather work on better SDKs and integration with other ideas to get people what they want, rather than trying to take this prototyping tool into a direction it's not meant for. When we shifted their focus, we asked the composer users, do any of you want to become core maintainers and the problem is when you have software designed for beginner users or even things like say Mozilla Firefox, right, you know it's designed for consumers. It's really hard to pull those folks into becoming users that one in 10 is probably more like one in 100 or one in 1000 right. So not seeing developers coming in there we didn't want to have a project in the in the greenhouse that was live but didn't have anyone home if you had a question or or wasn't cutting new releases or keeping up with where fabric was going fabric to do that that sort of thing. So that was where we collectively as a community made a difficult decision to archive that project. It's the code is still available but we're not directing attention to it and quite the same way we were. Even though it's good code even though the users liked it you know this is one of those things those tough decisions you have to make when you're managing that portfolio and dealing with a lot of new people and bound to the community and now there's there's other better ways to onboard people climbing that learning curve with fabric but it's missed you know. The, there was the original vision as I understand of a single code base. For a lot of reasons which you already elucidated that wasn't technically possible and maybe not politically possible I don't know. And it's interesting to hear you talk about a tiny little bit of consolidation that there was definitely a phase of growth and there was almost a race to be among the first to contribute. I presumably underneath the hopes of getting you know early developers to learn how to use your software. I don't know if it's fair to say it's plateaued but it's definitely slowed and there is a bit of consolidation as you just indicated. Is that going to continue. I mean is it possible that at some point you know interoperability plugged in interoperability plugged into interoperability becomes just a single code base again like was the original vision. Well I don't think we ever get back to a single code base. I do want to say first there's a, you know the pace of new projects joining you know as as as top level projects. We've kind of put a throttle on that a little bit, just because you know what one thing that we found is as a better approach is encouraging projects to join hyper ledger labs which is our kind of lower criticality more easy place to get some code started. Maybe it's the result of a prototype a weekend hack maybe it's something that somebody isn't sure if others find value in but let's put it here. It doesn't get the promotion that we do for our main projects and it doesn't necessarily out of the shoot get its own logo that sort of thing, but it is all under an open source license, it is all built publicly. And what we found is that starting projects there. And as they mature, promoting them up to to projects like cactus and Avalon that both started as as labs driven projects is a better way to get started. And so we've seen a lot of interesting things happening there this year. There's a project there to do a central bank digital currency and defined using the token taxonomy framework. For example, there's another called the blockchain automation framework. Both of those could become top level projects as we call them over time, but we're, we're taking the time to build a community and build like a more solid code base there first before graduating them up so in that way we've gotten more mature and maybe slowing down in that way isn't a bad thing. I think we're all realizing to like, there isn't, we're not our goal is not to be GitHub, you know our goal is not even to be the Apache software foundation we want to be a well curated portfolio of core infrastructure blockchain projects, and and allowing for some competition between those but also looking at what can we work on together. So that's where projects like Ursa, which is about unifying the crypto cryptographic routines underneath all the other projects as a way to make it easier to adopt new routines make it easier to validate that there are fewer bugs in that code than you might otherwise have if you had three different implementations of the same idea. That's the kind of direction I see the community going in is modularization component and componentization and then growing some of these labs projects a little bit more organically. We do have some great questions coming in from developers that I want to be sure that we get a chance to go to, but very quickly just with an eye to the future I wanted to ask if you could kind of expand a little bit on that modularity concept that you were just talking specifically as relates to the newly revealed open governance network. And there is a bit of modularity there I could be mistaken could you just kind of walk us through. What is this new thing in case I'm not the only one that hasn't had a chance to read in detail yet and what might it look like in the future. I've been working a little bit this year on helping address what people have cited as one of the big challenges with getting the permission blockchain networks, not necessarily bootstrapped but but but flying in production, which is the governance structure for these initiatives where you know if you've pulled together 10 different companies and you know a lot of them are competitors with each other. And if you were bootstrapping that production permission blockchain network off of either a single vendor or say a central actor in that ecosystem. There's always going to be participants going well I'm not going to put my real transactions assets there until I know that this has a degree of independence whether it's technology vendor independence or independence from my main competitor. I don't want them running the blockchain network right is always a concern and it's completely valid concern because we do all these these things to try to be really centralized and otherwise would be if we're happy letting one company run the central database or all of the nodes in the blockchain network we might as well do something that's more like Airbnb or PayPal right then something shared. And so we've been working to put together both a conceptual model as well as some specific examples of having the Linux foundation serve as a governance home for these kinds of blockchain networks. We're working on two of those right now both in the regulatory space around reporting to one around pharmaceuticals the other around insurance reporting using hyper ledger technologies in both cases although really conceptually these will be independent projects those will be sister projects and frankly if they would rather use corda or rather use quorum they should feel free to right. And so this is this is modular with respect to hyper ledger they might even come up with code that could be upstreamed into hyper ledger over time. But they're really about you know the same way that we form consortia to answer the software question how do we build that software together. This is about how do we piece that software together plus legal constraints plus you know human governance into a functioning network. And so we do have a blog post up about that I'll try to drop the link in the chat so people can get it but and we'll be announcing kind of the first couple of these before the end of the year. Thank you Brian. I've got a question here from an Ethereum developer who wants to go to the dark side and enter the hyper ledger ecosystem. Andrew asks are there any example repos I can try to learn from from setting up a private chain to integrating messenger and event systems like Kafka and rabbit MD to deploying a smart contract on to it. Sure. So hyper ledger Bezu is a one place to get started. And the website for that project will have has a list of tutorials, both written kind as well as video that you could watch to kind of get bootstrapped to understand how to stand up a Bezu node how to stand up a network of nodes, how to write solidity smart contracts and deploy it to Bezu to that to that permission network, as well as how to stand Bezu up as a public chain node and it's one of the three or four top clients software for the the Ethereum public chain, as well as the Ethereum classic chain. So start with that and then when you're, I'm not quite clear on where where I would recommend going in terms of integration with Kafka and rapid MD. But the Bezu developers hang out on the hyper ledger chat system and just simply chat hyper ledger.org. We have to do everything slightly differently. So instead of using Slack we use something called rocket chat for for the community. But that's a good place to show up and start asking some questions and and it does support different consensus mechanisms. So if you're looking at using Kafka as the consensus mechanism for Bezu. That's where I would go as to where the core developers hang out on chat and ask them there about where to potentially get started in writing your own consensus module for for a Bezu. And Kyle asked if you could clarify something that you said earlier about some people who choose to use the term multi party system, instead of blockchain. Be the thinking or necessity behind having to use that different wording. Well, it's not necessarily a more accurate term. It's a little bit more generalized term I mean and to some degree the Internet is a multi party system right. But it's a multi party system that works in fact do credit to the domain name system for being something it's not based on a blockchain but is about as close as you get to, you know, a decentralized approach to solving a big consistency problem. And so there are companies out there where if you say the word blockchain as in the name of your project or you're asking for money, you know, somebody's going to look at that and do a Google search and see all this kind of alarming kinds of content and their first reaction might be wo wo this sounds, this sounds weird I don't want to touch it right so in some cases it is a marketing challenge, more than anything else, and potentially as well though, you know it's a term that might encompass other web three technologies like IPFS for example IPFS at its core is a DHT not so much a blockchain, and yet it's being used in a lot of blockchain projects so if we were to have IPFS related projects inside hyperledger which could could happen. It wouldn't be appropriate to call IPFS a blockchain technology and so we're expanding our scope in that way might be on the table might be something we'd look at. And it really does come to down to what's what's something of value that we can do in this space right what do our members want. What is the broader community want and I think I think we'll see where the term blockchain goes in 2021. I want to ask question from the audience then I want to wrap things up with a closing question. So, this is from Angela Maria, oh really quick before I get to Angela Maria, someone in the audience, Michael, I won't use your last name. I asked you to clarify your question in private if you could clarify that I'll do my best to answer it. We all were waiting for Michael to clarify. Angela Maria writes that she would like to ask whether there are plans specific discussion within hyperledger on an open source blockchain as a service project. Are there any plans for hyperledger itself to host organized open source blockchain as a service project or might that already exist. So one important kind of thing that we agreed early on and then again this was me asking the community to make sure that we were clear on this was that hyperledger was going to be about software. And it was really going to be up to you to deploy it to build a network. Right. That way we could avoid all the complexity around not having a main net not having a coin that's when I said there'd be no hyper coin I still say that. I do apologize to my staff for not making them filthy rich. But the, but we're always about about being that software that people that would go off and build into their own networks and that will continue to be true. But there can be there can be better software I believe for helping those launching blockchain as a service offerings. Today we've got a lot of the major vendors kind of incorporating fabric into their own kind of larger management systems whether that's IBM into IBM blockchain platform or Azure into their into their kind of consoles and that's going to make sense. But if we really want to have lots of other companies out there offering these kinds of things, you know, companies like digital ocean for example or others, having more automated ways or even for vendors or end user organizations with their own IT staff, having more automated ways to use that seems like a really good idea. And I think that's the goal of the blockchain automation framework project that we have in hyper ledger labs. So definitely encourage you to check that out. I promise when I framed this last question I did not originally intend to do it to plug my own work, but I'm going to on accident. So we are currently, when I say we I mean Forbes is currently in the middle of its third year of putting together the blockchain 50 list of billion dollar companies that are taking blockchain seriously. For anyone who's considering nominating you have to be a billion dollars or more we've gotten a lot of enthusiastic nominees that did not meet that criteria. But one of the things that I've loved about that doing that list for now three years is sort of identifying some trends over time. And without a doubt, the, the percentage of live active production blockchain applications is increasing notably. In fact, I'll give you a little inside information here for anyone's here. My guess is that roughly 90% of our list members this year or next year will have live applications as opposed to our first year where it was kind of the opposite where it was 10% live and 90% POC. But with the increased number of live projects there's I think a decreased number of total projects as POC is kind of go dormant or the use case doesn't prove out. There's just not demand for it. So the total mature projects are increasing but the total actual projects is decreasing. A positive or a negative thing for hyper ledger like is hyper ledger doing okay I want to get the business question here like is hyper ledger doing okay financially will we still see hyper ledger around in five 10 years. So, let me answer the last question first so we're absolutely okay we're here we, this has been a hard year for lots of different companies and consortia are kind of, you know expect to be last on the list to be bought into and kind of first in the list to be cut when budgets go down right. And so we are we've certainly had some churn this year as we do every year, but but we have our core staff we've got a mission to deliver. And we're not a for profit company, we scale ourselves up or down based on the market demand for this right, and many open source projects at the Linux Foundation grow and then they reach a point of stability because the software is doing what what what people expected to do. And there's needs for for upkeep and maintenance and and new ideas to come in from time to time. And, you know, we'll right size to that and with the launch of these governance networks and some other projects that at the Linux Foundation. You know we'll see the, the, the, the blockchain concept kind of permeate other projects at the Linux Foundation and probably end up with more people over time working on it than than just at hyper ledger. Yeah, so, so we're all good, and we don't have VCs kind of breathing down our neck wanting a 10 X return and in five years, or anything like that so so we can survive and it's really through our membership that we're able to do this. And then secondly, I think the the economy did affect the capacity at their for proofs of concept, certainly made anybody who was doing that kind of less interested in pushing out press about it, right. So I think there's still lots of experiments that we're not hearing about, we hear about it on one on one phone calls with our members but they often are kind of hesitant to even do a blog post or other kind of PR around it because they want to see how it turns out. But you're right that other networks are doubling down and increasing on trade lens, for example, which everyone loved to kind of beat up on because it was very mercicentric at the very beginning. So from 175 different organizations participating directly on it, 50% of the global container shipping fleet fleet fleet is represented on the platform. 1.6 billion transport events posted so far on the network and 14 million documents. So like it's getting real use, but these things are like icebergs you see the very top of it, and underneath is where the mass of it. And that stuff there's not really an incentive for folks to be incredibly public about because they're not hyping a coin they're not driving some other kind of, you know, other other interest in like widely talking about. So sometimes getting stories out from our members is one of the biggest challenges of what we have to do, but we see it we feel it and it's powering through this pandemic and I think in 2021 things are going to be really amazing on that front. So last question future focused. You just reminded me as you were talking about trade lenses over 170 members. As we've seen an increased attention being paid to zero knowledge proofs. This, this technology layer that can sit on top of public block chains and give them privacy that is sort of comparable in many ways to a permissioned blockchain. Are we moving towards a world where all of these permissioned block chains are going to be done on public block chains with new technologies like zero knowledge proofs providing the same privacy or will there always be a need for a permission system. I think I think there's a need very much like there's a need for subnetting and networks where, you know, not all of our traffic between like my home server and my laptop goes over the public internet right, or even we see VPNs out there quite a bit because good security is in layers and layers. And it's certainly possible. I mean, we've seen this in the beginning with that anchoring transactions or anchoring checksums into the public block chains on a periodic basis can help provide that same degree of trust and integrity that that the permission ledger would have if it were operating entirely on the public chain but but give you the speed and adaptability and regulatory compliance and data residency requirements and all those things that that are a lot of big drivers for the permissioned block chains so I think I think they'll exist in resonance with each other and find find a way to coexist that provides value to the enterprise is that's that's what it is at the end of the day. But it's been heartening to see the public ledger community evolve from where it was five years ago to where it is now which is potentially a substrate for a lot of these kinds of activities. And now I've already told you twice last question, Michael just got back with the clarification on the question you asked earlier. So let me make sure I get this right so hyper ledger bests you version for what will look like what will be its top key features. Okay, great. And I know we're a past time so I'll simply say, we leave it up to, we leave it up to the individual projects to decide what direction they want to take the code base in. They do that publicly, they have a couple different processes for doing that typically issuing rfcs calls for comments on different proposals and, and that sort of thing. Being decentralized in this way is actually key part of how we scale and how we work so I would turn you over to the Bayesu community asked you to check out, check out the website for Bayesu the wiki space for it. And if you have questions to join the chat channel for them and I know they're very open to it and one of their biggest things on Bayesu is that they track the public blockchain technology roadmaps very closely so you can join me with the theorem 2.0 and all those things is super important for them. Awesome. Brian, everyone in hyper ledger thank you so much for putting this together looking forward to seeing the coming up events over the next weeks. I believe that you and I are going to be talking one more time or at least I'm going to be doing one more panel over the next month or so. I also just wanted to give one last plug I definitely follow Forbes's blockchain 50. You will see hyper ledger members represented in large number there will also see fascinating projects from other code bases and other repositories. But yeah it's been fun to follow looking forward to following for another five years. I think such a fair and accurate chronicler of everything going on in our community. We really appreciate it. And the blockchain Forbes 50 is like a huge calling card for us so we're in a world where we don't have the metrics of coin market cap. Next year you're going to see data that you have never had before from the list we're going to go really deep with the data this year I think you'll start next year. So though it should be a lot of fun for a lot of people to go through. It would be great. Well thank you Michael and thank you everyone else for participating and asking some really good questions. Take care everyone. Bye bye.