What if the cost of shipping a container halfway across the world could be reduced by 50 percent? Or patient records could be available immediately in any medical facility around the globe? Or every shipment of food could be tracked mile by mile to avoid spoilage? These are a few of the problems that the Hyperledger Project, an open-source initiative to build blockchain and related tools, is seeking to tackle by leveraging the growing power of new transaction-based technologies.

“We’ve had a decline in the trust in institutions, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. This is a way to try and make the world more accountable and more fair,” said Brian Behlendorf (pictured), executive director of the Hyperledger Project at The Linux Foundation.

Behlendorf stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) during Open Source Summit in Los Angeles. They discussed elements of the Hyperledger Project, the potential impact on high-profile breaches and recent code releases. (* Disclosure below.)

Oracle joins the Hyperledger initiative

Launched by The Linux Foundation in 2015, the Hyperledger Project recently announced that Oracle would be joining the group initiative. The concept behind the project is to create a shared, distributed ledger that will promote a transparent system for the recording and verification of transactions.

“The more governance and business processes that you can automate by smart contracts, the more effective and efficient a lot of these markets will be,” Behlendorf said.

The potential to apply blockchain concepts to a variety of different applications has attracted interest in many business sectors, including areas such as credit monitoring bureaus, as exemplified by the widely-reported Equifax breach.

“We can assess risk through blockchain technology in a way that doesn’t require us to build these big central, anonymous third parties that ‘Hoover’ everybody’s data up and become these massive privacy Titanics,” Behlendorf said.

There are eight different projects currently underway at the Hyperledger initiative. The project recently released Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, a blockchain framework. “This is a code ready to be run in production systems and ready to track digital assets with it. The clear intent is ‘let’s make this usable by enterprises,’” Behlendorf concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Source Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Open Source Summit 2017. Neither The Linux Foundation nor Red Hat Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE