Lab Name

Harmonia

Short Description

Harmonia, a Hyperledger Lab, is a repo and mailing list dedicated to capturing the unique constraints and requirements faced by regulated blockchain networks seeking to interoperate, underpinned by a set of design documents, protocol definitions and sample code.

Scope of Lab

The use of enterprise blockchains in regulated settings is accelerating, with multiple projects, such as HQLAx and Fnality, now live, or soon to go live. The users and operators of these networks are increasingly focused on ensuring these networks, which use a range of underlying blockchain technologies, can securely interoperate, and can do so in a way that is compatible with the unique legal and regulatory environments in which the networks operate.

Initiatives such as Hyperledger Cacti and YUI, a Hyperledger Lab, as well as the work of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and others have led the way in driving open standards and open-source general-purpose frameworks for interoperability.

In parallel, firms focused more tightly on solving interoperability challenges in the specific domain of the emerging regulated financial networks have been working on bilateral implementations, in many cases in tight collaboration with lawyers and domain specialists. This work has been mostly, although not exclusively, confidential.

As a result, those working on these initial regulated interoperability scenarios have not been able to fully exploit the work of the projects listed above, and those projects have not been privy to some of the unique requirements that have emerged, and design principles that they result in.

The purpose of Harmonia is to bridge this gap, and facilitate a harmonisation of approaches to increase clarity and commonality for all participants.

Unlike Hyperledger Cacti and YUI, Harmonia is not a new interoperability framework. And, unlike the work of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Interoperability Working Group, Harmonia is not intended to define a standard.

Instead, our objective is to share a set of principles, requirements, designs and code samples to inform a conversation across the industry and to facilitate the discussion and collaboration required to incorporate this body of knowledge into the existing interoperability workstreams.

As such, the emphasis of the Lab is more weighted towards documentation and a venue for discussion, and relatively less towards code. However, sample code and useful libraries and modules are provided where we believe they can be valuable.

Initial Committers

  • https://github.com/coeniebeyers - Adhara
  • https://github.com/eierina - R3
  • https://github.com/fenryka - R3
  • https://github.com/gendal - R3
  • https://github.com/MarkOldfield - R3
  • https://github.com/MicheleCullinan - Adhara
  • https://github.com/mkrielza - Adhara
  • https://github.com/petermunnings - Adhara
  • https://github.com/r3domfox - R3

Sponsors

  • https://github.com/VRamakrishna - Venkatraman Ramakrishna - Member of the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for 2023 and Maintainer of the Cacti project.
  • Susumu Toriumi (susumu.toriumi@datachain.jp) - Maintainer, YUI

Pre-existing repository

  • https://github.com/AdharaProjects/Crosschain-Interop