The Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) approved a proposal submitted by engineers at Monax and Intel, to incubate the community’s first Ethereum derived project – Burrow, a permissionable smart contract machine.
“We’re extremely excited that Burrow has been accepted into Hyperledger. This is a huge step in creating a forum in which the larger enterprise community can contribute towards building production-grade applications with the EVM smart contact interpreter. Inclusion of the code base in Hyperledger will ensure the longevity of the open source project under the mature devops and governance of The Linux Foundation and will be a primary driver toward the realization of enterprise grade ecosystem applications.” – Casey Kuhlman, Monax
In a blog post from Hyperledge boss Brian Behlendorf titled Hey – You got your Ethereum in my Hyperledger! he notes:
Burrow, becoming a project under Hyperledger, is important for a variety of reasons:
First, and foremost, having an Ethereum derived project under the Hyperledger umbrella should send a strong message that any positioning of the Hyperledger and Ethereum communities as competitive is incorrect.
The blockchain technology community still has many technical challenges to solve, and many different possible approaches to solving them. “Permissioned” and “unpermissioned” represent two ends of a range of options for configuring a distributed ledger, not a binary choice. Choices we can make at the smart contract layer are even more complex. Being able to collaborate on various approaches to these problems is fundamentally important to getting really innovative ideas into production-quality code as quickly as possible.
Secondly, with an Apache licensed Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), other distributed ledger projects in Hyperledger (e.g. Fabric, Sawtooth Lake and Iroha), can now experiment with integrating the EVM into their respective platforms. There is still much work to do to make this happen, of course, but the prospect of this is now much more tangible. This also marks the start of a productive relationship with the broader Ethereum community, including the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, as we monitor the specifications developed there for their application towards Burrow.
