Hyperledger onboards Citi, forms Besu working group headed by DTCC

The open-source blockchain software developer now has 135 members and is heralded as a tokenization leader.

Open-source blockchain software developer Hyperledger Foundation has onboarded two more members and created the Hyperledger Besu Financial Services Working Group. The working group will seek to strengthen alignment between service developers and organizational users.

Citi and the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) are new foundation members. They join 133 current members, including banks, central banks, tech firms, nonprofits, educational institutions and retailers. Members can support the foundation financially or through “sweat equity,” executive director Daniela Barbosa told Cointelegraph. Their support ensures the continuation of the foundation’s 13 projects, and the code they produce is enterprise-grade.

A large portion of the financing Hyperledger receives goes toward providing training for expert users, who are experiencing greater demand as the foundation’s products are adopted, Barbosa said.

Hyperledger Besu is Java-based software with an extractable implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It was initially developed by Consensys, which contributed to the Hyperledger Foundation in 2019. The code from all 13 Hyperledger projects was contributed by companies, Barbosa said.

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Contributing code to an open-source foundation is common when a company does not want to be the sole developer of software. Open-sourcing a project makes development faster and enables a larger ecosystem to be formed. Barbosa adde:

“As more and more companies, governments and different organizations take this code and bring it into production, they need partners and vendors to support them in that journey.”

Hyperledger works with 35 vendors. Besu users need a diversity of vendors and partners for a healthy marketplace, Barbosa continued. She noted that some of Hyperledger’s projects, such as Besu and Fabric, have overlapping features. Open sourcing allows companies to collaborate on the development of noncommercial features of software.

The new Besu working group will be chaired by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which is already a premier-level member of the foundation. Other members, not all of which are foundation members, include Accenture, Banco Central do Brasil, Consensys, Citi, Japan Securities Clearing Corporation, Mastercard, Santander and Visa.

Hyperledger Besu is the most widely adopted software for asset tokenization, Blockdaemon reported in early 2024. In a survey of 92 firms, more than 40% of them mentioned it, Blockdaemon found. It also stated that “the tokenization landscape is […] splintered, and often outright hidden,” and it is impossible to predict what that landscape will look like in 12-18 months. It warned:

“It is conceivable to envisage a future where a handful of interoperable private chains control the lion’s share of tokenized flow.”

Hyperledger Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation.