On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Hyperledger Project, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Vice President, Blockchain Technologies, penned down the project’s round up for this year, with a sneak peek into 2017.

The Hyperledger Project was announced on December 17, 2015 and IBM was among several founding members that contributed code to the cause. Named ‘Fabric’, the code aimed to develop a new style of blockchain that ensured data privacy, consistency and suitability for a wide variety of industry use cases.

Cuomo writes, “A full year later, there is much for the community to celebrate:

• The first production network, running with over a quarter of a million blocks in its shared ledger;
   
• More than 4,600 developers subscribed to the Hyperledger Slack and 1,800+ GitHub stars;
   
• A diverse set of code committers (individuals, companies, countries) contributing to Fabric code;
   
• Dozens of companies (large and small) building new business networks using Fabric;
   
• The first set of commercial offerings available on any cloud (public or private) with Docker, including a highly secure blockchain extension off the IBM Cloud;
   
• A community-defined Fabric v1.0 that represents a year of diverse input across a variety of industries and use cases.”

He said that so far the Fabric has been used in many engagements, across many industries and use cases. This includes IBM Global Finance, Everledger, Walmart, and CLS Group, among others.

“These client engagements were possible because of IBM and the Hyperledger community’s agile design method of: doing and failing fast, and then succeeding quickly with a modular approach”, Cuomo added.

Speaking of corporate contributions to Fabric, he acknowledged the efforts of London Stock Exchange, Digital Asset Holdings, DTCC, Fujitsu, Huawei and Hitachi.

“Fabric is rapidly evolving toward a March 2017 milestone where v1.0 will be suitable for production networks. This next version represents the voices of the diverse community of contributors and users. Modularity continues to be a key design focus with improved capabilities around query, consensus, and membership services”, Cuomo wrote.

“A year wiser, Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 is shaping up to become the foundation for the era of the Internet of transactions where one network can run transactions directly with the peers of any other network – a modular approach much like the network-of-networks model on the Internet.”