Staff Corner

LF Decentralized Trust at One: Accelerating Innovation, Collaboration, and Opportunity

Daniela Barbosa, General Manager of Decentralized Technologies at the Linux Foundation and Executive Director of LF Decentralized Trust |
LF Decentralized Trust at One: Accelerating Innovation, Collaboration, and Opportunity

Today marks one year since the launch of Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT). Over the past 12 months, our community has grown, new projects have taken root, and existing projects have advanced. It’s a good moment to reflect on what we’ve built together and, more importantly, to look ahead at the opportunities still to come.

We’ve hit many milestones, including:

(Read the Technical Advisory Council Report: Year One of LF Decentralized Trust for more on the work across our community since we launched.)

However, looking forward is how we keep pushing ourselves and the market. The sections ahead highlight how our members, projects, and overall global community are helping shape this next chapter across finance, supply chains, digital identity, and more.

The rise of tokenized money

Around the world, new digital platforms, assets, and business models are quickly moving from pilots to production. With clearer regulatory guidance emerging in many jurisdictions, traditional financial institutions and central banks are accelerating their exploration of tokenized deposits, CBDCs, and tokenized collateral, fueling institutional adoption of LFDT technologies.

Yet tokenized money still represents only a fraction of global financial activity. Like other transformative technologies such as the early days of cloud computing, the challenge is scaling both the technology and the expertise so institutions can adopt with confidence. Global, collaborative, open development is what makes that possible. 

By building this next-generation financial infrastructure on open, inclusive, and transparent foundations, we can ensure it is resilient, decentralized, and ready to grow with the demands of the market.

Enterprise adoption of public and permissioned networks

From the beginning, almost 10 years ago, our community has recognized that there will never be a single blockchain to meet all needs. As the market and technology has evolved, so too have enterprise implementations.

At LFDT, we are nurturing a growing and maturing ecosystem of enterprise-grade ledger technologies that power production systems built atop of public, permissioned, and even hybrid networks. Here’s just a sampling:

As enterprise adoption accelerates, interoperability becomes both more important and more complex. Advancing interoperability at scale is a priority for our community, and it often requires collaboration across ecosystems. The Secure Asset Transfer Protocol (SATP) at the IETF, for example, provides a standards-based foundation for cross-network value exchange. Within LFDT, projects like Smoot, which originated from the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Crosschain Interoperability Working Group, reflect this same commitment to practical, open interoperability.

Supporting enterprise implementation is another area of growth for our global community. Our Certified Service Provider program which has grown with eight new CSPs, designed to help organizations deploy and operate Besu and Hyperledger Fabric, will continue to expand in importance as enterprises embed decentralized technologies into production systems.

And, as these networks connect, the ability to establish trusted identities and verify data across them becomes essential. This is a challenge the community is already addressing through our work on digital identity and trust infrastructure.

Mandate for trust infrastructure

Governments and regulators around the world are increasingly requiring digital identity verification and trust services for public infrastructure and essential services. Even in places without formal mandates, demand is growing for better ways to manage identities, authenticate individuals and products, reduce fraud, and protect privacy.

The LFDT community has been advancing this work for years through both code and standards development. Projects such as CREDEBL, Hyperledger Identus, and ToIP, along with working groups and collaborations with other Linux Foundation initiatives, are helping to redefine how governments and enterprises deliver trusted services. A recent case study highlighted the role of Besu in powering public sector blockchain networks such as the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) and LACChain across Latin America, demonstrating how open technologies can support large-scale, government-backed trust frameworks.

ToIP is building interoperable frameworks for digital identity and verifiable data exchange, providing governance models and technical specifications that complement LFDT’s project landscape. This work is becoming even more important with the rapid rise of AI. Verifiable data and digital provenance are emerging as essential tools to ensure authenticity, accountability, and trust in the digital era.

Privacy and security innovation

As decentralized systems move into mainstream use, the expectations for privacy and security are rising. Meeting these expectations requires more than incremental improvements and calls for new approaches to how data and transactions are protected.

Across the LFDT community, projects like Lockness and numerous labs are advancing privacy-preserving tools such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and Threshold Signature Schemes. These techniques are moving from research into production, helping institutions meet regulatory requirements while protecting sensitive data.

Early adoption is already visible in financial services, government, and other critical sectors. As these tools mature, they will accelerate broader market adoption and ensure that decentralized systems can be both secure and trusted at scale.

Foundation for the future: Governance and neutrality

Open technologies with strong governance have always been at the core of market-changing innovations. For decentralized systems in particular, openness, interoperability, and resilience are essential.

LFDT exists to provide a neutral home where competitors and collaborators alike can build shared infrastructure that no single vendor or institution controls. This neutrality is what makes the outcomes collectively trusted and ready for adoption at scale.

Proprietary or vendor-controlled approaches may deliver short-term solutions, but they carry the risk of lock-in, fragmentation, and limited trust. For example, a Layer 1 or Layer 2 network controlled by a single Web3 company can change licenses, pivot away from enterprise needs, or even stop development altogether, leaving users without a stable path forward.

By contrast, LFDT ensures continuity and long-term stability through open governance, community-driven development, and a neutral home where no single entity sets the rules. Over the past year, our members, projects, and global community have expanded the developer base, launched new initiatives, and welcomed new contributors. Looking ahead, that same commitment to neutrality and open collaboration will be the foundation for scaling decentralized technologies into the next decade of finance, trade, government, healthcare, and beyond.

Building a Decentralized Future, Together 

For nearly a decade, our community has been building the foundations of decentralized trust. The past year marked an important expansion with the launch of LFDT, and what we have accomplished together in that time is only the beginning. 

We are grateful to every person and organization who has contributed and supported this work. We invite you to join us in building the decentralized future. Everyone has a role to play, and all are welcome. #BuildingBetterTogether
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