We are very excited to announce the latest of the Hyperledger projects, Hyperledger Avalon. Some of you may know Avalon as TCF or Trusted Compute Framework, the name it held during the initial phases of its collaborative development. In fact, that collaboration is one of the stand-out aspects of Hyperledger Avalon. It is an interesting intersection of Hyperledger, EEA, and cloud service provider ecosystems and is perhaps the most broadly sponsored project to date. It brings together sponsorship from Intel, iExec Blockchain Tech, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, BGI, Chainlink, Consensys, EEA, Espeo, IBM, Kaleido, Microsoft, Banco Santander, Wipro, Oracle, and Monax. That’s quite a list of sponsors by any standard. The natural question is what could drive so much interest?

There are a couple of key challenges with blockchain that probably don’t surprise any reader of this blog: scalability and confidentiality. One approach to both of these limitations is to perform some operations “off-chain.” In a traditional view of a blockchain, the data and validation logic for every transaction takes place on every node of the blockchain network or “on-chain.” It’s this redundancy and transparency that provides a network with its integrity but also comes at the cost of performance and confidentiality. By offloading some work, participants can trade off resiliency and integrity for performance and confidentiality. Of course, everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, and so the use of the use of “trusted computing” is intended to maintain resiliency and integrity guarantees as much as possible while affording the additional performance and confidentiality. Trusted computing includes a variety of techniques to ensure that computation was done correctly and secretly. Hyperledger Avalon will realize these as different Worker types and include TEE (Trusted Execution Environments like Intel® SGX), MPC (multi-party compute), and ZK (zero-knowledge proofs).