Working towards a world of many chains

An interview with Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project

Hi Brian, to start, can you explain what Hyperledger is?

The Hyperledger Project was founded in December 2015 as a collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally.

The beauty of cross-company and industry open source projects is that organisations can share the unprofitable and unsexy work of building the libraries and standards, which underlie systems. A shared code base also serves as an excellent way of concurrently building a standard for coexisting on a blockchain.

What is the main interest of your members and the main goal of your organisation?

The joint goal of Hyperledger is to develop a common distributed ledger technology that is shared, transparent and decentralised, which makes it ideal for enterprise applications in finance and a myriad of other areas including retail, banking, manufacturing and the Internet of Things. Designed for collaboration and with a strong focus on privacy, confidentiality and auditability, Hyperledger allows anyone to create their own blockchain shared ledger for their own company, industry or personal use case.

Why is your model open source versus closed source? Are you building the platform on a specific blockchain?

The Hyperledger Project envisions a world of many chains, some public like Bitcoin, some private, some “unpermissioned” like Bitcoin, some “permissioned” like those you will likely see in healthcare settings, at least initially. Hyperledger aims to provide tools for communities to build their own chains, rather than driving everyone to one chain. Much like the Apache web server project drove people to build their own websites, rather than encouraging everyone to just use one big site.

What can you tell us about interoperability?

Interoperability is essential within a given blockchain — you all have to agree on a consensus mechanism, a smart contract platform, and your membership model. Thus, it can be hard to evolve these over time, as technologies mature and new ideas arise. Furthermore, these chains don’t all have to “talk” to each other, transactionally — an application could perhaps post a message from one into another, creating a “hyperlink between websites”, but still be from two very different kinds of chains.

What is important is to provide a common framework for building these chains.. to help the blockchain business ecosystem standardise and thrive.

What is important is to provide a common framework for building these chains — for making these choices as much of a “run-time decision” as possible. This is comparable to the way you can deploy Linux in very different kinds of computing hardware and circumstances, but at its core is still the same software. This has benefits, in that it’s relatively easy to find someone with Linux development skills, and those skills are portable to different environments. That’s what we need to help the blockchain business ecosystem standardise and thrive.

How far advanced is Hyperledger in its development processes?

The Hyperledger Project is among the fastest growing projects at The Linux Foundation with an impressive membership base. We are also seeing rapid co-development on the Hyperledger Fabric product, involving IBM, Digital Asset Holdings, and several other corporate participants. This project just posted a “developer preview” release, a necessary step on the path to an alpha, a beta, and finally a full release.

Could you shed some light on the debate between private blockchain that is able to handle higher transaction volume vs public blockchain which is limited to lower transaction volume while maintaining higher standards of security?

What is the long-term solution in your view? How are you allowing for private and confidential transactions while maintaining the right level of security?

It’s not so much a “debate” as a simple matter of physics. On a permissioned chain (which could be public or private), you can use a simpler consensus mechanism (such as PBFT), because you don’t have to worry about “sybil attacks”. Therefore you can set a target transaction volume and size up the compute requirements of the nodes to meet your desired transaction target. This is mandatory for certain use cases, such as stock markets or other kinds of financial applications.

Security plays a role but is orthogonal to all of this — it may be a desirable property of a private chain (which could only also be permissioned) that you can log more sensitive information to it, but there’s nothing inherent to the use of a blockchain that makes those nodes more invulnerable to hacking and information disclosure. At the very least, though, a blockchain (whether public or private) can provide a good means to ensure that a cyberattack can’t change data imperceptably, because they’d have to hack every node and make that change all at the same time. So, a distributed ledger becomes a much more trustworthy repository of data than a database or logfile kept at one company.

Where in the insurance industry do you think blockchain can make an imminent material impact? What kind of implications do you see due to such changes?

Blockchain technology could transform the way people manage identities and personal information, drive honesty and transparency and influence consumer perceptions of risk that could change the way insurers support them.

Blockchain applications in insurance will likely start with digital identity systems and management of personal data. An identity created within a blockchain would be completely unique and offer a higher level of security that the insured party was who they claim to be and offer a greater sense of online security in general. The reduced administration costs and increased levels of security are both major benefits to customers even if they are challenging for the current insurance model to handle.

We are seeing interest grow rapidly in Asia. How do you view Asia as an opportunity for blockchain technology? How do you think it is different from more developed markets? Where do you see the real opportunity for this region?

Financial institutions are hugely excited about blockchain technology all over the world including Asia. Blockchain brings the promise of tracking and giving transparency to all transactions and making them tamper-proof since individual transactions are not kept in a single place but stored on computers globally. Blockchain can allow end users to save money on international financial transactions, and move money around instantly and securely. This could be a huge opportunity for Asian markets.

This interview is part of Nest’s Unpacking Blockchain series.

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Brian Behlendorf (@brianbehlendorf) is the Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project. Behlendorf was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. He has also served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013. He was the founding CTO of CollabNet and CTO of the World Economic Forum. Most recently, Behlendorf was a managing director at Mithril Capital Management LLC, a global technology investment firm.