The distributed ledger code bases of IBM and Digital Asset Holdings (DAH) have been put forward for merger by the two companies according to proposal sponsored by two members of the Hyperledger Project’s Technical Steering Committee. Those two TSC members are Tamás Blummer, the Chief Ledger Architect at DAH, and Christopher Ferris, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM Open Technology.
The goal of their the merged code base incubation proposal is to formally evaluate the proposed code base as a foundation for the Hyperledger Project.
The move will form a merged repository of the IBM and DAH contributions based on a successful experiment implemented at a face-to-face Hyperledger hackathon hosted by JPMorgan in New York City last week, and advance that base to the point of formal evaluation.
At the conclusion of the hackathon, the collaborators from various Hyperledger Project member companies working on the merged code base were able to produce a running Proof-of-Concept code that integrated components of the Blockstream, DAH and IBM proposed code base contributions.
Moreover, the hackathon team proposed the following high-level next steps:
- Implement additional features on the common API
- Prunable, indexed, auditable storage for transaction on the blockchain
- Revisit block level validation
- Common representation of artifacts in .proto files for the gRPC protocol
- Joint repository and build process
- Configurability of OBC
- High test coverage
- Documentation of architecture, build process, etc
The proposal highlights resources dedicated to the project by member companies.
IBM and Digital Assets are committing full-time engineering resources to ensure the success of this project. Many other members have already expressed interest in contributing to unit, integration, performance and scale testing as well as to the implementation itself. The following would be the initial set of maintainers for the project: Binh Nguyen, Tamás Blummer, Robert Fajta and Sheehan Anderson.
Binh Nguyen is IBM’s Blockchain Fabric Chief Architect, while Sheehan Anderson is the IBM Advisory Software Engineer for the Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project.
Blockstream is not a party to the proposal or is its code base.
