Bank-Backed Hyperledger Is Slowly Opening to ICOs

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk this week, the Sovrin Foundation, creator of the Hyperledger Indy codebase for digital identity management, intends to become one of the first to raise money by launching a crypto token using the consortium's code this summer, effectively following through on a promise first detailed in a white paper last year.

Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf told CoinDesk several projects are talking about launching tokens on top of the multiple codebases overseen by the group, including Sawtooth and Fabric.

PokitDok, a healthcare API platform exploring blockchains, recently began researching launching an ERC-20 token, the ethereum standard for crypto tokens, on top of Sawtooth, Behlendorf said.

"In theory, we could even use standards developed in the ethereum community for doing tokens on top of other ledgers," he continued.

Stepping back, Sovrin believes tokens running on an open blockchain can serve as a key ingredient to its distributed identity network, one that will offer a greater functionality than a permissioned blockchain.

Under its proposed design, any identity claim verification will cost some nominal amount, which will then be payable in the token.

"Tokens are a little bit of Brave New World," said Windley.

Sovrin's token will also be used to pay Sovrin stewards who validate and write data to the ledger, plus as an anti-spam measure to disincentive writing bad information to the ledger.

Despite the controversy surrounding ICOs at this time - whether it be the regulatory uncertainty or the scammy nature of many crypto tokens - Windley said that Sovrin has experienced no pushback from its partners so far.

One of those answers could be crypto tokens, although others - like the W3C veterans who recently launched Veres One - have opposing views about the drive to ICO. Indeed, Behlendorf and the team at Hyperledger remain "Sympathetic" to the interest in ICOs, but don't see a future where Hyperledger itself issues a crypto token.