Hyperledger Blockchain Technology Board elected an IBM Official as its Chairperson

Another International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) official has been elected by the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) as its chairperson. The TSC is a community which is primarily responsible for guiding the technical direction for Hyperledger. The election took place amid an altercation over the growing representation of the tech company on the board. Hyperledger Blockchain Technology Board elected an IBM Official as its Chairperson. Global X change.

According to an email received by the TSC mailing list, Dan Middleton, the head of technology for Intel’s blockchain and distributed ledger program, was succeeded by Arnaud Le Hors. Le Hors is a Senior Technical Staff Member of ‘Web & Blockchain Open Technologies at IBM’. Middleton wrote on the list, “I’m happy to have the chair role in good hands.”

Christopher Ferris, an IBM distinguished engineer and CTO of Open Technology in IBM Cloud, was replaced by Middleton a year ago. Ferris had been the chairman of the TSC since 2016.

Last year, the TSC launched the ‘Diversity, Civility and Inclusion’ working group. As per an email by Middleton, the working group focuses on both demographic and corporate diversity but pays particular attention to the former.

In the same year, more cooperation between projects such as Hyperledger Ursa, Sawtooth and Fabric, were noticed by the consortium. Hyperledger Ursa, a tool worked on by Hyperledger Indy project developers, enables people to avoid replicating other work of cryptography.

Middleton added, when it comes to influencing Hyperledger, code is king. He said, “The real influence in an open-source community like this is contributions,” and continued, “I sort of wish that all the effort that went into discussions on the election and all the effort that will go into coming up with complex election rules just went to actual technical development.”

The Hyperledger TSC has been creating working groups that focus on technical problems, authorising projects and analysing updates.

Global exchange- The contributors of Hyperledger code elected the TSC for 2019-2020 in September. Six out of the eleven TSC members are IBM employees. Five work at Big Blue and one, Mark Wagner, is a senior principal engineer at Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM.

The doubling of the number of IBM employees in the committee gave rise to concerns that the company has a significant influence over Hyperledger. Hyperledger is an open-source enterprise project hosted by The Linux Foundation to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies.

Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, responded that the TSC should aim at enlarging the size of the committee with the governing board, adding, or for “one time add of a set of new TSC members, so that this greater representation can happen in the current TSC team.”

The new chair had already considered those suggestions, and published a proposal on the Hyperledger TSC agenda page. It stated the next four candidates in order from the last election should join the present term. Global exchange.

Behlendorf wrote in an email, “All those will be topics taken up by the TSC in what appears to be pretty short order.” 

According to the bio, Arnaud Le Hors worked at IBM for almost 20 years and has been involved with Hyperledger since its inception. He served on the TSC 2018-19 and played a part in Fabric, the oldest platform of Hyperledger. Fabric is also the foundation for the blockchain implemented by Walmart to track food through its supply chain management system- Globalexchange.