Hyperledger, a collaborative cross-industry initiative aiming to advance blockchain technology, announced the addition of eight new members at Consensus 2017.

The latest members include Alphapoint, Change Healthcare, CITIC, Clause Inc, Deloitte, Ernst & Young LLP, FZG360 Network Co. Ltd, and Schroder Investment Management Limited. The members have joined the project to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications.

"These new members have joined Hyperledger bringing a diverse set of skills at a crucial time," said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. "Consensus is a great platform for our members to set the stage and speak to what's happening in our community, as production blockchain deployments increase. I look forward to working with these new companies to drive open blockchain technologies forward across industries."

With the addition of these new members, the project has grown to 142 members – a 373% percent increase since Hyperledger was announced with 30 members in February of 2016. It now includes 8 open source projects, of which three were announced in the last two months including Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Composer. Additionally, in the last two months projects Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, and Hyperledger Sawtooth have all graduated from Incubation to Active status. The Hyperledger Meetup Community is now at 52 global Meetups with 12,884 participants.

Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms, and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.

"Infusing blockchains that bring finance and operations together requires an approach that looks at finance, tax, audit, technology, and processes holistically, which has been a challenge to do," said Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader. "We are delighted to join this project as Hyperledger will empower businesses to execute smart contracts and transact securely across the enterprise; embedding finance throughout the supply chain, sales and marketing and HR."