In a recent blog post, Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger project, announced that the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee has approved a proposal, submitted by Monax and Intel, to incubate the first Ethereum derived project called Burrow, a permissionable smart contract machine.

The Burrow project has been an open source project since December 2014 and was previously known as eris-db. On the Hyperledger Burrow GitHub page, the project is described as:

Hyperledger Burrow is a permissioned blockchain node that executes smart contract code following the Ethereum specification. Burrow is built for a multi-chain universe with application specific optimization in mind. Burrow as a node is constructed out of three main components; the consensus engine, the permissioned Ethereum virtual machine and the rpc gateway.

In the past, there has been some perceptions about the Ethereum and Hyperledger communities competing against each other. Behlendorf explains this does not have to be the case:

First, and foremost, having an Ethereum derived project under the Hyperledger umbrella should send a strong message that any positioning of the Hyperledger and Ethereum communities as competitive is incorrect. The blockchain technology community still has many technical challenges to solve, and many different possible approaches to solving them. “Permissioned” and “unpermissioned” represent two ends of a range of options for configuring a distributed ledger, not a binary choice. Choices we can make at the smart contract layer are even more complex. Being able to collaborate on various approaches to these problems is fundamentally important to getting really innovative ideas into production-quality code as quickly as possible.

Since the Burrow project executes smart contract code based upon the Ethereum specification, there are now opportunities for integration with Hyperledger distributed ledger projects. Behlendorf explains:

With an Apache licensed Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), other distributed ledger projects in Hyperledger (e.g. Fabric, Sawtooth Lake and Iroha), can now experiment with integrating the EVM into their respective platforms. There is still much work to do to make this happen, of course, but the prospect of this is now much more tangible. This also marks the start of a productive relationship with the broader Ethereum community, including the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Monax Industries was part of the recent Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announcement, and much like Hyperledger, focuses on bringing blockchain technologies to the enterprise. In a recent blog post, Casey Kuhlman, CEO of Monax Industries, describes some of their motivations for also joining the Hyperledger project: