What Is Hyperledger?

Here's a good comment that I found on Reddit, contrasting Ethereum and Hyperledger:

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Hyperledger isn't a specific technology. It's a Linux Foundation banner project for multiple blockchain and DLT technologies, each of which have different characteristics:

See https://www.hyperledger.org/projects

The common theme to them all is that they are permissioned, and none involve cryptocurrencies.

Monax's Burrow project (formerly ErisDB) was recently accepted, which is a permissioned EVM (Ethereum virtual machine) node implementation. So now the other Hyperledger projects have the option of integrating an Ethereum virtual machine into their codebases too.

https://github.com/hyperledger/burrow

Fabric is the dominant project within HL. It was developed as OpenChain by IBM and contributed to Hyperledger at inception, and has been working towards a 1.0 release which is imminent. It is the basis of the IBM Blockchain commercial offering, and is getting a lot of traction in Enterprise settings.

https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/

The primary aim of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is to build an extension/variant of the public Ethereum specification to cover the additional use-cases which Enterprises need to get into production - along the themes of scalability (usually just pluggable consensus), privacy and confidentiality and permissioning. JPM Quorum is an example of an Ethereum fork seeking to meet those needs:

https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum

Many of us see all of the public/consortium/private use-cases as being something which will likely converge over the next few years. Sufficiently modular codebases should be able to handle them all, with dynamic composition of components. We are working towards the creation of an extended Ethereum meeting all those needs.

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This article might be a wake up call for anyone that still doubts the utility of such projects, and the amount of research that goes into them.