Ten years ago today, the Linux Foundation launched its first blockchain-related project, the Hyperledger Project, a collaborative effort to “advance popular blockchain technology.” At the time, blockchain was largely viewed in the enterprise as an experimental technology. It was promising in theory, but unproven at scale, raising questions about security, performance, governance, and regulatory fit. It was often also conflated with cryptocurrency, which many institutions associated with volatility, regulatory uncertainty, and speculative use cases.
The Linux Foundation created the Hyperledger Project to provide a neutral, open source foundation where companies could separate the underlying technology from the hype. Its mission was to address concerns around security, performance, governance, and compliance and begin shaping blockchain into production-ready infrastructure.
In early 2015, enterprise communities were already laying the foundations for blockchain adoption. With the launch of the Hyperledger Project, leading global technology companies such as IBM, Cisco, and Fujitsu came together alongside financial institutions including DTCC, JP Morgan, ANZ, and SWIFT. Recent headlines often suggest that institutions are only now “arriving” at the blockchain table. However, the reality is that they have been engaged and building in-house capacity from the very beginning, and we have been there supporting them in that journey.
For the past decade, the Linux Foundation has played a central role in educating the market and equipping engineers to work with this transformative technology, supporting enterprise use cases across financial services, supply chain, healthcare, digital identity, and more. Today, our LF Decentralized Trust umbrella foundation stands alone as the only neutral foundation with this depth of history and sustained focus on enterprise-grade decentralized technologies at global scale.
Over the past ten years, through its expansion as from Hyperledger Project to Hyperledger Foundation and, now, LF Decentralized Trust, our community has grown into one of the world’s most important hubs for decentralized infrastructure. The creation of LF Decentralized Trust in 2024 marked an intentional expansion beyond blockchain alone, reflecting the reality that trust infrastructure today spans identity, privacy, interoperability, AI assurance, and governance, alongside distributed ledgers.
In our community, enterprise-grade blockchain technologies matured under open governance, enabling production deployments across regulated industries.¹ ² Identity frameworks, credential protocols, programmable privacy systems, and interoperability standards all found a neutral home where contributors could build together rather than compete. ³ 4 Across this period, maintainers delivered new capabilities at a pace no single organization could match,5 and LFDT projects moved from early proof-of-concepts to powering critical infrastructure in production.6
The last decade also marked the widespread adoption of our open source technologies across global markets. Major financial institutions built tokenized money, asset networks, and settlement platforms on LFDT projects.7 Governments deployed trusted credential systems for identity, licensing, and benefits.8 Entire industries, from healthcare to supply chain to climate and sustainability, shifted toward verifiable, privacy-preserving, and interoperable digital infrastructure.9 What started as a set of open source repositories has become a worldwide network of production systems anchored in shared trust.10
As we look forward to the next decade, the opportunity ahead is even greater. AI systems now depend on verifiable data and cryptographic assurance. Digital money and tokenized assets require interoperability across protocols, networks, and jurisdictions. Privacy has become programmable, not just protective. And global-scale infrastructure demands clear non-functional requirements, shared standards, and transparent governance. LFDT’s role is more essential than ever: ensuring that the technologies the world relies on remain open, inclusive, and stewarded for the public good.
And our project portfolio and community continue to grow to address these opportunities collaboratively with new standards, code bases, and deployments for privacy 11 12, stablecoins 13, AI in decentralized identity 14 , and more on the horizon.
Over the past decade, LF Decentralized Trust’s membership has grown steadily in diversity, reflecting the expanding role of decentralized technologies across the global economy. In the last year alone, we welcomed a new wave of members, including Web3-native companies such as OpenZeppelin, Etherealize, Nethermind, Gateway.fm, and Shielded Technologies, as well as central banks like Deutsche Bundesbank and the Bank of Korea. Together with long-standing financial institutions such as DTCC and technology providers including IBM, Kaleido, ioBuilders and Oracle, these members create a rare forum where emerging innovation and public-sector trust requirements can be developed side by side under neutral open governance. 15-22
Unlike single-protocol foundations or vendor-led consortia, LFDT brings multiple production-grade technologies, identity frameworks, and governance models together under one neutral umbrella, allowing enterprises and public institutions to collaborate across domains rather than in silos. Throughout this journey, LFDT has also worked closely with adjacent ecosystems, standards bodies, and public-sector initiatives, recognizing that trust infrastructure only succeeds when it is interoperable beyond any single foundation.
However, none of this progress would have been possible without the thousands of contributors, maintainers, members, and ecosystem partners who have shaped this journey over the past ten years. From Brazil to India, from Japan across the Americas and Europe, your work, your contributions, and your belief in open development and open governance have built something that will last far beyond any single project or moment. As we celebrate this 10 year milestone, we also continue the work—strengthening the foundations of trust for the digital era and the decades to come.
When I joined the foundation in 2017, I was often asked when “blockchain” would become mainstream in the enterprise. My answer was that foundational technologies like this take ten to fifteen years to mature. Looking at where we are today, it’s clear that this community has spent a decade doing the hard work required to get here. Here’s to the next ten years, as we continue working collaboratively to bring the benefits of decentralized trust into production across industries.
A big THANK YOU to everyone who has supported this community since 2015. We recognize the vital role our members, contributors, maintainers, and advocates play in this work. Your commitment, collaboration, and belief in open development have made this journey possible, and we are deeply grateful to be building what comes next together.
~daniela
Daniela Barbosa
General Manager of Decentralized Technologies at the Linux Foundation
Executive Director of LF Decentralized Trust
____
Join us at 6:00pm PST today, December 17, for a live stream from a celebration at our LFDT San Francisco Meetup. Highlights will be a fireside chat with Brian Behlendorf, the first Hyperledger executive director, and a panel discussion with members on “Why Industry Leaders Invest in Open Source Collaboration.”
References