Hyperledger’s  four-year existence has been crowned by a special event. The US-American group Walmart has now joined the blockchain group. Hyperledger, which is under the patronage of the Linux Foundation, announced this news at the “Hyperledger Global Forum” event. The event takes place from 03 to 06 March in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to Walmart, seven other companies have joined. Other companies that rely on Hyperledger include the technology companies Conduent and Clear, a blockchain company focused on clearing in the telecommunications sector. Walmart’s director of software development for blockchain platforms stated:

One of the reasons we are now a member of Hyperledger is to show the open source community the importance of interoperability. You can assume that they are all on the same blockchain network and use the same framework. We have developers at Walmart who participate in the open source community and we look forward to further participation in the future.

Hyperledger has about 250 members The managing director of Hyperledger, Brian Behlendorf mentioned that the project already has 250 members. Hyperledger is an open source collaboration that was created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Behlendorf went on to discuss open source software:

Hyperledger includes a larger pool of users and companies that can provide support and services. Not only is the code released under an open source license, but it is also created publicly with developers from many different companies. This ensures a level of reliability that you won’t get from a single vendor solution, no matter how it is licensed.

Having joined the Hyperledger project, Walmart will now also join IBM’s Food Trust Network, a food traceability platform based on Hyperledger Fabric. The world’s top-selling company joins Walmart Walmart Inc. (until 2008 Wal-Mart Stores Inc.) is a globally active US retail group that dominates a large part of the US market. Walmart is ranked number one in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s top-selling companies. Walmart employs over two million people worldwide, making it the largest private employer in the world. Walmart’s sales in fiscal 2017 were 500.3 billion US dollars. The profit was 9.9 billion US dollars. The company’s total market capitalization in mid-2018 was 246.2 billion US dollars, making it currently the most valuable retail company. * Originally published in German at CVJ.ch