In 2019, we continued to see an impressive amount of deployments of Hyperledger technologies across various industries. The majority continued to be early adopters, but that is not to say that large corporations did not take notice. Major production networks are now in place covering use cases ranging from trade finance and KYC to supply chain traceability to self-sovereign identity networks. Our identity project, Hyperledger Indy, graduated to ‘production ready’ active status, and we have seen an outpouring of digital identity business solutions come to market.

The professionalization of blockchain matured further at Hyperledger through the expansion and growth of professional certification programs. Hyperledger launched the certification program for administrators for Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth and kicked off the Hyperledger Certified Service Provider Program. Several new Working Groups and Special Interest Groups were also formed to help foster deeper discussions and collaboration within the community. Hyperledger technologies are now available as managed blockchain-as-a-service offerings across all major cloud providers – offering technologists a variety of options in how they build, scale and manage their blockchain networks. Salesforce and Microsoft became general members of Hyperledger, proving their investment in the technology and commitment to open source.

We also made great strides on interoperability, driven in part by ConsenSys’ contribution of Hyperledger Besu, the first blockchain project submitted to Hyperledger that can operate on a public blockchain. Besu represents the growing interest of enterprises to build both permissioned and public network use cases for their applications. The launch of Facebook’s Libra also resurfaced many questions around cryptocurrencies and their potential in fixing the current internet payment infrastructure. We see interoperability between Hyperledger projects only growing stronger over the next year and beyond.

In 2020, we will most likely move beyond the early adopters and see many large, credible enterprises setting up networks or joining consortiums in order to keep doing business with their clients. In fact, by the end of this year, Walmart is requiring all of their leafy green vegetables suppliers to be on the Food Trust blockchain network, which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric. Finally, discussions around governance, scaling and managing these networks is far from over, and neither is the conversation about which platform or set of technologies is ideal for a particular use case.