The Monax ‘Burrow’ codebase has officially been accepted by Hyperledger’s Technical Steering Committee for incubation, according to a statement from Monax COO and general counsel Preston Byrne.

Monax is the first Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain accepted into the ambitious Hyperledger project, a consortium of companies working together to develop standardized blockchain protocols.

The acceptance brings Connecticut-based Monax’s protocol under the Hyperledger umbrella, which already includes blockchain implementations like Fabric by IBM, Sawtooth Lake by Intel and Cello by JP Morgan. The Burrow code will now be published on Hyperledger’s proprietary GitHub page and open to contribution from a diverse set of developers already involved in the project.

The incubation agreement will further allow Monax access to Hyperledger’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the Turing-complete platform which can execute scripts using a decentralized network of nodes.

Being accepted for incubation now means that Monax can use the new Apache-licensed version of the EVM, paving the way for the development of more complex smart contracts.

In a discussion with CoinDesk, Byrne summarized the plan of action moving forward, saying:

“In the short term, the biggest change will be the ability for members to contribute toward hardening of Burrow’s EVM implementation in order to support production grade ecosystem applications. Contributions now have the assurances provided by the strong governance regime established by the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger project. In the medium term, we will be working with other Hyperledger projects to ensure that Burrow runs well in combination with various blockchain bases such as Sawtooth Lake and Fabric.”

The development of the Burrow platform is seen as a way to reduce friction among smart-contract platforms by standardizing language at the protocol level and allowing for greater interoperability among different implementations of the ethereum blockchain.

“We look forward to seeing Burrow help reduce the friction in building sophisticated smart contract based ecosystem applications. We also look forward to the Hyperledger community’s expertise being leveraged to harden and improve Burrow’s EVM and secure native features,” Byrne said.

Monax is also a member of the recently announced Enterprise Ethereum consortium.

Chick and eggs image via Shutterstock

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