Hyperledger could soon integrate the Ethereum blockchain. It would be the first public blockchain hosted on the platform.
The situation, however, is somewhat complicated.
It all started with a proposal from ConsenSys that suggested to the Hyperledger consortium to adopt the Pantheon project, a suite of services created by PegaSys and based precisely on the Ethereum blockchain.
Pantheon is a Java-based client that is used to develop business applications with features such as privacy and authorisation management.
The 50 engineers who make up the team that developed Pantheon are members of ConsenSys.
On August 8th ConsenSys sent the proposal to adopt the Pantheon client to a Hyperledger mailing list. The members of the consortium have not yet decided whether to accept the ConsenSys proposal or not, but it has already been decided that, in case of acceptance, Pantheon will be renamed to Hyperledger Besu Besu.
If the proposal were accepted, this would allow the Hyperledger project to use the Ethereum blockchain through the Pantheon client. In addition, it would allow merging different blockchain projects such as IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric and Intel’s Hyperledger Sawtooth.
To date, Hyperledger does not use any public blockchain, so the entry of Pantheon would result in adding to the project a first public blockchain, like the one of Ethereum.
Moreover, the same open-source code of Pantheon would also be published on the GitHub page of Hyperledger, so as to be open to all developers involved in the project.
Pantheon uses also private and test networks, such as Rinkeby, Ropsten and Görli.
In the past, however, there had already been some contacts between Hyperledger and Ethereum, thanks to the Burrow initiative and the collaboration of the consortium with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
The specific advantages that a public and decentralised blockchain can guarantee are not replicable with private blockchains, so it is more than logical that an enterprise consortium like Hyperledger agrees to the use of this type of blockchain, on top of the private ones already in use.
Moreover, it is no coincidence that the Ethereum blockchain could be the first to be integrated into a project of this magnitude, given that among those on which a significant number of smart contracts are running, it is the one with the most history and experience at its back.
