Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), a multinational Spanish banking group, has become an official member of open-source collaborative blockchain project, Hyperledger.

According to Hyperledger collaborative cross-industry effort created to advance blockchain technology, eight new members have joined the project including BBVA, to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications.

“Each month, I am thrilled to see new members from all walks of life and varying industries join Hyperledger. This community includes some of the smartest minds working to advance open blockchain technologies and bring about transparency and trust into this next generation stack of the Internet. I’m eager to see where this year takes us with production deployments,” Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger stated.

The latest addition of new members includes China Jiangsu Huaxin Blockchain Research Institute, Colored Coins, Consensus Base Inc., NEX Optimisation, SecureKey Technologies, The Blockchain Research Institute and VSP Global.

“Being a Hyperledger partner is an important step forward in BBVA’s blockchain strategy, as it allows us to participate in the most relevant open-source communities in the industry and collaborate with companies from a wide range of sectors,” Carlos Kuchkovsky, New Digital Business CTO of BBVA, said. “We believe that Hyperledger will be fundamental to ensuring standardization and interoperability in the different technologies and platforms that will make blockchain a powerful tool that will transform business processes and social relationships.”

The announcement follows soon after the addition of SAP, one of the market leaders in enterprise application software, as a Hyperledger Premier member.

Hyperledger has been focusing on enabling organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions. This is done by creating an enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base. The members of Hyperledger Project comprises of leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing, and technology.