Today we are announcing that we’ve joined Hyperledger, a Linux Foundation community that focuses on open source implementations of the emerging specifications and standards for blockchain and distributed ledgers.

Over the past few years, blockchain has shown significant promise across many industries to manage complex workflows and logistics. Enterprises and startups have gone beyond the technology’s digital currency roots to build more business-oriented blockchain applications that leverage a mix of networks, both public and private. From finance and logistics to healthcare and insurance, these applications often focus on scenarios that span multiple parties in a given industry and sometimes even across industriess

To achieve the desired business outcomes, these new applications need both cross-chain interoperability and integration. Delivering this requires more than a single effort or organization. Instead, it needs to be done in collaboration with the community to define open specifications and corresponding open source implementations of those specifications.

As a founding member of both the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and the Token Taxonomy Initiative (TTI), Microsoft has been a key contributor in standards and specification efforts. Based on the growing maturity of these specifications, we believe it is now time to take the next step of the journey with our colleagues in the blockchain community and work together on delivering open source implementations of these specifications.

We believe that developing standards and open specifications, as well as collaborating on implementations of them, is critical to removing customer blockers and accelerating blockchain as a mainstream technology. Through our work related to the EEA and TTI, we have identified several opportunities for Microsoft to lean in and contribute code in project areas such as tokens, ledger integration, and developer experience.

We’re excited to join the Hyperledger community and look forward to rolling up our sleeves and being an active contributor to both discussions and project code.

Questions or feedback? Let us know in the comments below.