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More On Red Hat Launching Blockchain Open Source Initiative

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:48 PM
Justin OConnell
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:48 PM

In April, Red Hat announced the OpenShift initiative to aid financial services industry in building hosted blockchain applications. Red Hat would manage container application deployment with OpenShift Dedicated support for financial institutions interested in experimenting with the blockchain.

“We are pleased to partner with Red Hat and have initially deployed BlockApps STRATO, our Ethereum Blockchain infrastructure on OpenShift,” the company stated. “This platform supports the development of smart contract solutions and can allow developers to build and deploy their blockchain applications very quickly. The collaboration was a logical direction and BlockApps is incredibly excited to work with Red Hat as the first blockchain provider on the OpenShift platform.” Like other organizations investigating blockchain applications, Ethereum is a considerable part in Red Hat’s plans.

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, which are applications designed to run as programmed and without the possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

“This technology is key component of many of the blockchain solutions we evaluated by the financial services industry,” Rich Feldmann, Global Director of financial services at Red Hat, told CCN.com.

OpenShift Dedicated is Red Hat’s container application platform customers: “Using OpenShift Dedicated, fintech startups, ISVs, and financial institutions can explore blockchain-based cloud services that use open source technology to develop updated transactional applications that can help streamline business processes on a transparent and more secure platform,” Red Hat stated.

OpenShift Dedicated will enable blockchain solutions through its container application platform technology. Red Hat participates in the Hyperledger Project, an open governance project centered by the Linux Foundation. Red Hat represents the second largest corporate contributor to Linux .

“While the initial focus of the initiative is on financial services,” Feldmann said, “we do see opportunity beyond financial services and will be including all blockchain startups in our partner outreach efforts. We have no announcements to make at this time.”  Practical reasons drew Red Hat towards the financial services industry.

“Solution development in the financial services industry has gotten most of the early focus by startups so it was logical for us to focus on this industry for this initiative,” he elaborated. “Also, Red Hat has a long history in working with the customers in this space.” A majority of the world’s exchanges do run on Red Hat products, he notes. Red Hat is  in the process of thinking through the security implications for blockchain application.

The multinational is a worldwide leader in using the open source models for developing enterprise software, and is active participants in a wide range of community based open source projects such as Fedora, JBoss.org, OpenStack, and OpenShift Commons and others. 

“We believe the open source model is the best way to develop enterprise software as it gives a broader set of developers the opportunity share and collaborate on ideas,” Feldmann said. “Red Hat’s success and the wide acceptance of our open source software in the enterprise is a testament to the strength of the open source development model. Many of the traditionally proprietary technology software companies today are contributing to open source projects – providing further evidence of the trend toward open source development for new technologies such as blockchain.”

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