The Hyperledger Besu team is excited to announce Hyperledger’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC) members voted to graduate the project from incubation to active status. The Hyperledger Besu team believes this decision demonstrates the strength of the Besu project and the active community supporting it. With this announcement, Hyperledger Besu joins Fabric, Indy, Sawtooth, and Iroha as projects with active status in the Hyperledger greenhouse and the only Ethereum project to be granted active status.

Since Hyperledger Besu joined Hyperledger in August 2019 under incubation, the Besu team has remained focused on growing Besu’s developer base and making it an inclusive community. The Besu team has had active participation from a number of organizations, including several that have become maintainers of the project. Some of these organizations include ConsenSys, Chainsafe, Web3Labs, Machine Consultancy, Everis, ETC Labs, and MyEtherWallet. Each of these organizations provides critical code to improve and grow the featuresets of the codebase. For example, Chainsafe and ETC Labs focus on maintaining Besu syncing with Ethereum Classic networks, whileWeb3Labs builds the privacy feature. These critical contributions help make Besu the high quality project it is.

Hyperledger Besu’s team has been focused on developing the project to be a leading client for the public Ethereum mainnet as well as in permissioned consortium settings. The Besu team has built enterprise-grade features, including privacy, permissioning, and consensus mechanisms. The optionality of running Besu in a public chain or permissioned chain setting is part of its radical appeal with community members. Now that Besu is an active project, we plan on continuing to encourage enterprises, individual contributors, and application developers alike to explore and support Besu to ensure it continues to evolve to fit each of their purposes.

What Does Active Status Mean?

By voting for Hyperledger Besu to be granted active status, the Technical Steering Committee acknowledges that Besu meets all of the Incubation Exit Criteria, including legal requirements, high-quality documentation, consistent tooling usage, and diversity of community requirements. Each of these requirements helps demonstrate a project is a safe, welcoming, and vibrant space for community members to join and contribute. By being designated as an active project, Besu is demonstrating that it is meeting Hyperledger’s highest standards for a project.

What is next for Hyperledger Besu?

The next quarterly release, v1.5, is scheduled for mid 2020 and will include our most ambitious features to date. Some features include:

Performance improvements, including block propagation, block product and validation, transaction pool management, and JSON RPC query response time.

Privacy Improvements

Beam Sync Early Access

Mining Support

Additionally, the Besu team is focused on building out performance metrics using another Hyperledger project, Hyperledger Caliper. The team is looking forward to publishing those results soon.

Hyperledger Besu continues to sit at the intersection of Hyperledger and Ethereum and hopes to continue to grow both communities. We think graduating to Active status is a giant step forward in the project’s maturity.

Do you want to get involved in Hyperledger Besu?

Those looking to interact one on one with Besu developers and contributors can join the conversation on RocketChat at #besu, or join our bi-weekly contributor calls.

Interested in learning more, or curious on how to get started with Besu?