cloudparts

LF Decentralized Trust

The Linux Foundation’s home for ledger, identity and cryptography projects, formed in 2024 from the Hyperledger Foundation and Trust Over IP: Fabric, Besu, Hiero and others, each in incubation or graduated.

2 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux Foundation2 graduatedWebsite

What it is

LF Decentralized Trust (LFDT) is a directed fund of the non-profit Linux Foundation for “blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies”. Its charter took effect on June 17, 2024, and the LF launched it on September 16, 2024 with 17 projects and more than 100 founding members. It took in everything the Hyperledger Foundation hosted, the projects that had been run under the LF since 2015 together with more than 50 Hyperledger Labs; the Trust Over IP digital identity community, which became one of its projects; and two new code bases: Hedera’s network software, now Hiero, and Dfns’s Lockness. Daniela Barbosa, who had led Hyperledger since 2021, is its executive director.

Members must also be corporate members of the LF. Premier Members, such as Accenture, DTCC, Hitachi and Hedera at launch, each appoint a seat on the Governing Board, which runs the budget and outreach; the General Members are represented by one or two elected seats. Technical oversight belongs to an 11-member Technical Advisory Council (TAC): six members elected by the maintainers of LFDT’s projects and five chosen by the Governing Board. In October 2026 the foundation listed seven graduated projects (Besu, Cacti, Fabric, FireFly, Hiero, Indy and Iroha) and around ten incubating ones, among them AnonCreds, Identus, Paladin and Web3j.

For someone choosing a technology, the badge says less than it seems. “Graduated” is about process, not product: the TAC’s exit criteria say it refers to “the maturity of process” rather than general availability, and checks for things such as maintainers from three organisations, signed releases and OpenSSF Scorecard results. The Hyperledger name is not a badge either: each community picks its own name, so Fabric keeps “Hyperledger” while Besu dropped it, and the Labs are community-run repositories outside the lifecycle altogether. Much of LFDT is not a ledger at all but identity, interoperability and cryptography libraries, and the TAC moves projects down as well as up: in its first year it archived Hyperledger Aries and moved Hyperledger Cello back to Labs.

Its projects in this catalog

In depth

How a project moves#

A project enters with a proposal to the TAC that names its scope, its maintainers and the people committed to building it, and that is vendor neutral. If approved it enters Incubation, which is meant to be easy: incubating projects may overlap with each other, and the lifecycle document warns that some will never graduate. To be accepted at all, a project needs code under an acceptable licence, maintainers from at least two organisations, and a pass on the security checks.

Graduation is requested by a vote of the project’s maintainers and decided by the TAC, which since 2024 has leant on automated scores rather than badges it awards itself. The criteria name OpenSSF Scorecard checks that must be at or near 10 (licence, code review, branch protection, token permissions, dependency updates, signed releases) alongside manual checks: maintainers from at least three organisations, at least two releases in the past year, a real documentation site, and an ADOPTERS.md file pointing to production use. The TAC reviews every project each year and can keep, upgrade or downgrade its state. A graduated project that no longer meets the criteria can be sent back to Incubation; a project whose work stops goes to Dormant and, after six months there, is archived automatically.

Labs sit outside this lifecycle. They are repositories started and managed by the community, without TAC oversight, where ideas such as Bevel, Cacti, FireFly and Identus began before becoming projects. A Lab that wants to become a project still has to enter through Incubation.

Who decides#

The Governing Board manages the fund: it approves the budget, elects the officers, handles legal matters with the LF and may set up conformance programmes. Its voting members are one representative of each Premier Member, one or two representatives of the General Members, and the TAC chair. No company or group of related companies may have more than two seats. Michael Klein of Accenture chaired it at launch. Board meetings are private unless the board decides otherwise.

The TAC coordinates the technical projects, sets an overall technical vision, recommends where resources should go and owns the project lifecycle. Its meetings are open for anyone to watch. Each project keeps its own maintainers and technical decisions; the TAC decides whether it is a project, and at what stage.

Where it came from2015–2025

The Linux Foundation announced its intent to form a blockchain project at the end of 2015, and in February 2016 named 30 founding members of the Hyperledger Project, from ABN AMRO and J.P. Morgan to IBM and Intel, with code proposed by Blockstream, Digital Asset, IBM and Ripple. Digital Asset contributed the Hyperledger name. Brian Behlendorf became executive director in May 2016. Fabric was the first project to leave incubation, in March 2017, and reached version 1.0 that July. Other frameworks joined alongside it, including Intel’s Sawtooth, Iroha and Indy, and in 2019 the Ethereum client Besu.

By the early 2020s the organisation, by then called the Hyperledger Foundation and led by Daniela Barbosa, was pruning as well as adding. Composer was moved to end of life in 2020, Explorer and Quilt in 2022, and Sawtooth was archived in February 2024 at its maintainers’ request. Its scope had also spread from ledgers to digital identity and cryptography, an area where the LF also ran the Trust Over IP Foundation.

LF Decentralized Trust, whose charter took effect in June 2024, brought the two together. At its launch on September 16, 2024, Hedera handed over its entire code base, accepted as the project Hiero, and the Besu client dropped the Hyperledger prefix. In its first year the TAC tightened the lifecycle rules, archived Aries, whose components moved to the OpenWallet Foundation, moved Cello back to Labs and put Caliper on probation.

Why it’s built this way

One umbrella, many brands
The launch announcement lets each community pick its own project name, so the Hyperledger brand continues for projects that want it while others, such as Besu and Hiero, carry no prefix.
Scores, not badges
A badging task force set up in 2023 found that OpenSSF Scorecard and CLOMonitor already measured most of what badges would, so the lifecycle leans on those scores and leaves the final call to the TAC.
Graduation measures process
The exit criteria judge whether a project is run well (several organisations, public release plans, tests, security), not whether its product is finished, so a graduated project can still be young software.
A way down as well as up
Projects are reviewed every year, and dormant ones are archived after six months, so the list of projects reflects what is still maintained rather than everything ever accepted.

Timeline

  1. 2015

    The Linux Foundation announces its blockchain project in December

  2. 2016

    Hyperledger names 30 founding members in February; Brian Behlendorf becomes executive director in May

  3. 2017

    Fabric is the first project to leave incubation, in March, and reaches 1.0 in July

  4. 2019

    The Pantheon Ethereum client joins as Hyperledger Besu

  5. 2021

    Daniela Barbosa becomes executive director

  6. 2024

    Sawtooth is archived in February; LF Decentralized Trust launches on September 16 with 17 projects

  7. 2025

    The TAC archives Aries and moves Cello back to Labs; Hiero graduates

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

Improve this page on GitHub