Hyperledger, a Linux-led open source blockchain initiative, announced in a blog that Hyperledger Fabric, one of five of its incubator projects, will be released at the end of the month. Hyperledger Fabric is designed to be used as a foundation for distributed applications.

Hyperledger is an umbrella for software developer communities creating open source blockchain and related technologies. Fabric is the first of the five incubator projects to graduate. Fabric has not reached its v1.0 release, but the technical steering committee agreed that the project has met all of the incubation exit criteria.

Extensive Criteria

The criteria include test coverage and continuous integration support, community support, legal compliance, documentation, published releases, architectural alignment and infrastructure support for code reviews, defect tracking, continuous integration testing and more.

IBM provided the codebase for the Hyperledger Fabric project.

Since the project entered incubation a year ago, its diversity of contributors increased from nearly no diversity to 45%, representing contributors or developers working for one of 19 other companies, including banks, exchanges, large ISVs or startups.

The project’s 10 maintainers – persons leading the development – represent three different companies along with two individual contributors.

Expanding Sub-Projects

Hyperledger Fabric has also grown in terms of sub-projects from other community members, including Fujitsu, DTCC, London Stock Exchange and others.

“In my experience, few open source projects achieve that level of diversity in so little time,” wrote Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger’s executive director.

Hyperledger Fabric has published two releases, the latest being the v0.6 release in 2016. The team is finalizing development of the v1.0-alpha release.

“Our hope is that it is code that people can put into serious production,” Behlendorf, told Reuters.

Developers from more than 20 companies joined Fabric’s development, but the project has not entered a performance-testing phase, Behlendorf said.

Also read: Bank of England, Boston Fed join Hyperledger blockchain project

Membership Expands

Hyperledger recently introduced new members including the Bank of England, the U.K.’s central bank, and the Boston branch of the Federal Reserve. It now has 122 members.

In a first, central banks now join over a hundred participants from a number of industries such as finance, supply chains, manufacturing, Internet of Things, technology and more. The Bank of England, in particular, has led a number of efforts toward exploring blockchain applications and digital currencies.

Other notable new members include Guangdong-based banking giant China Merchants Bank; New York-based academic and industry consortium IC3, the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts; and blockchain startup Monax, among others.

Compared to other blockchain working groups, the initiative is gaining attention in mainland China with over a quarter of its members from the region.

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