Will Hyperledger kill crypto ?
Still waters run deep.
The increasingly famous, linux-hosted, IBM-backed blockchain ecosystem is ticking all the boxes, and challenging protocols in every industry.
What is it ?
Hyperledger is “an open-source collaborative effort” hosting many cross-industry blockchain projects, and covering, or at least exploring, all the blockchain use cases we could think of.
As an example, Hyperledger Fabric is their main permissioned, private blockchain project. Meaning, you can leverage the benefits of a blockchain while keeping control of your data.
Like Avalanche and its subnets, Polkadot and the parachains, Hyperledger offers channels: Closed environments, where the authorised actors of the network can utilise the full potential of the blockchain. Perfect for any company willing to use Blockchain, without having to develop a complete solution in-house — which would anyway be technically worse than the solutions created in a highly-skilled, open-source environment.
Unlike many other projects, Hyperledger was designed and developed to support smart contracts written in multiple programming languages: Go, Java, Javascript, Solidity, Python and many others to come.
They developed a native SDK, APIs and a plug-in environment in VSCode. All designed to ease learning, development and implementation.
None of these elements is unique to Hyperledger, but what really makes a difference is that they have no token, and never will. Hyperledger is not an economy, it’s a tool, and this changes everything.
Fall is coming
Bear or Bull is the tip of the iceberg.
Focusing on highly manipulated price-action doesn’t seem like a good use of your time.
The real shake-off will take place when big names start falling. Probably not top tier L1 yet, but these smaller, really specific blockchains with a limited use case. They can be replaced by a tailor made Hyperledger-based project in a second. Their real struggle is managing all the conflicts of interest between the actors of their network.
By wanting to be a whole economy, with your own currency, projects, languages and rules, you find yourself forced to allocate more ressources into maintaining the economy afloat, rather than developing the projects that will lock users in.
The freedom around the cryptocurrency enables speculators to take too much space, compared to the developers and the end-users. Unfortunately, this can only lead to an unstable market, riddled with conflictual interests.
Hyperledger’s solution is simple:
No Token
By removing the number 1 speculation tool, you’re only left with the projects built on top of the network. It eliminates the need to incentivise external actors to run nodes, because the people who are creating projects on your network are naturally inclined to do so.
No need for huge marketing campaigns to bring retail money to maintain the cycle of hope: Pumping the token price to make the chain more attractive for devs, to finally develop the dapps that might make the chain attractive to end-users, while your savage competitors are doing everything they can to do exactly what you’re trying to do, with one tenth of your problems.
Excitingly, no Hyperledger token doesn’t mean no token at all. Every project built on top of Hyperledger can create its own token, to act as a purposeful medium, to transfer data or value through the network.
A project based on hyperledger can offer an easier, almost web2, experience to all its users: Pay the fee, the membership or whatever cost and get access to the service. You can even get rid of the wallet fuss with a smooth enough API.
Finally, blockchain is becoming invisible.
The dev perspective
On another note, as an entrepreneur or developer, would you rather build a complete L1 to support your use-case or build the same use-case on top of a robust blockchain, that isn’t subject to financial manipulation ? Assuming your project can be boiled down to a business logic, and isn’t a Layer 1 in and on itself.
There are just too many variables to handle with your own L1, to make it worth it. Also, with the shortage in skilled human ressources, wouldn’t you naturally gravitate towards more technically flexible protocols ?
Investment-wise, they say you should always ask yourself if you’d still buy the assets you’re holding today, to decide if they’re still good investments. Same goes for a technological solution: keeping a project alive, just because there are too many sunk costs, is not a strategy.
As most creators would tell you, it’s important to kill your darlings.
Soon enough, some of them will.
50 shades of grey
Obviously, the short answer is no.
Hyperledger won’t kill cryptocurrencies. The flexibility offered by tokenisation and the blockchain is revolutionary. But it sure will burry projects. Precisely those that will get overwhelmed by all the variables needed to maintain an entire economical ecosystem.
More importantly, considering the death of cryptocurrencies makes us ask the good questions.
The real metrics to look at when trying to guess if a Layer 1 will survive or not aren’t throughput, time to finality or market cap. Rather, we should on the number of active nodes, the amount of developers and if there are any real world running projects.
With these questions becoming normal, the more legit projects will keep choosing strong solutions like Ethereum and Hyperledger. Strengthening the already strong network effect, one project at a time.
A few examples, for the road
Blockchain is meant to be a tool, not a business case.
Hyperledger allows that, wonderfully. Here are a few examples of large companies that adopted some of their solutions:
- Walmart Canada, with DL Freight. A solution for their invoice management
- TradeLense, who successfully used Hyperledger Fabric to track almost 70 million containers, and all the corresponding paperwork
- Renault, with XCEED. A solution designed to track and manage end-to-end car manufacturing supply chain
It’s amazing news, blockchain has proven its case. The only thing left to do is to keep learning, and allow the invisible hand to do its thing.
We might see solutions like Hyperledger take over the industry: flexible frameworks that enable companies with a strong blockchain foundation. Solutions that solve problem for companies, without creating new ones.
As always, time will tell.
