Yesterday, the Technical Steering Committee of the open source Hyperledger project held its first Hyperledger Hackathon, where a vote was held on the merging of code bases. The result was almost unanimous, with only one (unnamed) vote against it, which means that at present, the matter has not been passed.

If approved, the Hyperledger project will officially merge the code contributed by three project members, Blockstream, Digital Asset Holdings and technology giant IBM, into a new code base to form the basis of a new enterprise-level blockchain.

The purpose of the Hyperledger project in holding this conference is to build an open source blockchain platform for participants, on which participating members can conduct extensive transactions with each other. Although no consensus was reached in the end, it does not mean that the conference was a failure.

"It's exciting to see the participation of these core companies, as well as some new entrants," said Philip DesAutels, host of the conference and senior director of the Linux Foundation. "It's an encouraging start for an open source project."

Creation of Proof of Concept

One notable announcement at the conference was the successful creation of a proof of concept based on the combined code base of three members: Blockstream, DAH and IBM.

The announcement was made at the conference by Robert Fajta, senior developer at DAH.

“Yesterday at the end of the conference, we successfully verified the fusion of the code bases of the three companies and created this proof of concept,” he said.

This proof of concept combines Blockstream's validation code, IBM's OBC/UTX Chaincode and DAH's client layers. In the actual test, an account was loaded with 100,000 satoshis and charged 5000 satoshis in fees.

"We're not done yet," Fage said. "It requires further research and development. This is just a proof of concept."

No vote

Inspired by this proof of concept, the Technical Steering Committee expects to pass a proposal at the meeting to merge the codes of the three companies mentioned above. Dais Otels, the host of the meeting, seems very enthusiastic about promoting the passage of this proposal because after the merger, future testers and potential participants of future hackathons can use a unified code.

“The DAH development team came to us with this suggestion,” Dessotles said. “So I brought it to the technical steering committee to see if this was a path forward.”

The vote was informal. We listened to the audience at the convention.

“I agree with the full commitment,” one viewer said.

"Do you agree?" Des Orts asked another audience member. "Anyone disagree?"

"I'm a little worried that it's too early to make this decision now," said an unidentified audience member. "I think it would be better if there was more progress in terms of demand."

Just like that, hopes for a seamless transition to the next stage of development were temporarily dashed.

Technically, Des-Orts could have followed the bylaws’ two-thirds majority requirement, but he said he didn’t want to alienate voters, though that’s a bit stubborn, he admitted.

“It’s open source, so even though there’s no consensus, there’s a majority that agrees with the proposal, so I’ll go ahead and do it, and we do need to move forward,” he said.

The next meeting is scheduled to start next week. An informal vote was held to determine the location of the meeting. In the end, the East Coast of the United States became the preferred venue for the meeting.

White Paper Progress

The meeting members summarized the hackathon and are promoting the first white paper of the project. David Wall, Executive Director of JP Morgan Chase, reviewed the progress of the white paper.

The white paper was written in Google Docs, so members can suggest their own changes, but only if consensus is reached. Interestingly, Wall said that members appear to have copied a previous white paper written by IBM and replaced "IBM" with "Hyperledger."

But members are reviewing the details of the content to ensure that the Hyperledger project is clearly distinguished from Bitcoin and Ripple.

“What we want to make clear is that there are a lot of use cases where [bitcoin and Ripple] are not appropriate,” Wall said.

An unofficial version of the white paper can be read here.

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/hyperledger-on-the-verge-of-merging-blockchain-code-from-ibm-digital-asset/
By Michael del Castillo
Translator: printemps
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/merge-code-base)