Hyperledger Projects in 2026: What's Active, What's Archived

Hyperledger launched in 2016 as a Linux Foundation umbrella for open-source, permissioned blockchain projects aimed at enterprises, not public, token-driven networks. In September 2024, Hyperledger Foundation merged with the Trust Over IP Foundation to form LF Decentralized Trust, carrying forward all of Hyperledger's codebases under a broader identity and privacy mandate. The Hyperledger name lives on as a project brand (Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu), not the organization itself.

We first covered five of those projects, Burrow, Fabric, Indy, Iroha and Sawtooth, in 2018. Eight years on, their paths have diverged sharply: one is thriving, two are archived, and two sit somewhere in between.

Hyperledger Fabric: still the project enterprises actually deploy

Fabric remains LF Decentralized Trust's flagship permissioned-ledger project. Its current releases are v3.1.5 and a parallel long-term-support line, v2.5.16, both shipped on June 18, 2026, tested against Go 1.26.4 and CouchDB 3.4.2. Fabric's channel-based design, separate ledgers for separate groups of participants on one network, is still what most consortium and supply-chain deployments use.

A more significant change is brewing in Hyperledger Labs: Fabric-X, a ground-up redesign that splits the classic Fabric peer into independent endorsement, ordering, validation, commit and state services, replacing single-channel isolation with namespace-based policy isolation on one ledger. Its BFT ordering layer, Arma, targets over 15,000 transactions per second in its base configuration. As of May 2026, Fabric-X is MVP-stage, production-ready for pilots and benchmarks but not yet for regulated workloads, still inside Hyperledger Labs incubation, short of graduated-project status.

The gap between the two matters for planning: classic Fabric's Raft or SmartBFT ordering tops out in the low thousands of transactions per second, which is fine for most consortium workloads but a ceiling for high-frequency settlement use cases. Fabric-X's architects are targeting that ceiling directly, with sharded configurations claimed to reach into the hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, though those are vendor figures from early benchmarks, not numbers proven in a regulated production deployment yet. The Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust technical roadmap, published in April 2026, puts Fabric-X's graduation review in late 2026 to early 2027, with realistic production readiness for regulated workloads landing in 2027.

Hyperledger Burrow: archived since 2022

Burrow brought an EVM-compatible permissioned chain into Hyperledger, letting teams run Ethereum-style smart contracts in a consortium setting. Its technical steering committee moved it to end-of-life status on May 12, 2022, and the repository was archived the next day. The code is still public under its open-source license, and anyone is welcome to fork or revive it, but there is no active maintainer and no reason to start a new project on it today.

Hyperledger Indy: graduated, and moving onto Besu

Indy, a purpose-built ledger for decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, holds Hyperledger's GRADUATED status, its highest maturity tier. It is not standing still: a project called Indy Besu, which reimplements Indy's identity operations as smart contracts on Hyperledger Besu, moving off Indy's own custom ledger, is under active development, with DSR Corporation and CPQD preparing it for production use in Brazil's digital-identity infrastructure as of mid-2026. The related Hyperledger Aries project, which supplied agent and wallet frameworks for Indy-based identity, has itself been archived, with its components now maintained across separate repositories now, not as a single project.

Hyperledger Iroha: version 2 is still a release candidate

Iroha, a lighter-weight permissioned ledger originally built in Japan for digital-asset and identity use cases, has been in the middle of a full rewrite. Iroha 2, announced on February 5, 2025 and rebuilt in Rust with a new Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus (Sumeragi, tolerant of up to one-third faulty nodes), had reached version 2.0.0-rc.2.1 by mid-2026, still a release candidate short of a stable 2.0 release. Teams evaluating Iroha today are evaluating a project mid-transition, not a settled platform.

Hyperledger Sawtooth: archived, with maintenance moved elsewhere

Sawtooth, contributed originally by Intel and built around pluggable consensus (including its distinctive Proof of Elapsed Time option for permissioned networks), reached archived status on February 1, 2024, at the maintainers' own request, after achieving Hyperledger's graduated tier earlier in its life. Ongoing maintenance releases, where they happen, now come through the Splinter community, outside the Hyperledger or LF Decentralized Trust banner.

Why enterprises still choose a permissioned ledger at all

A public chain gives every participant equal write access and full transaction visibility, which is the wrong default for a banking consortium, a hospital network or a group of manufacturers sharing supply-chain data with competitors in the room. A permissioned ledger like Fabric lets a known set of organizations run the nodes, restricts who can see which transactions through its channel design, and runs consensus protocols built for throughput, not for resisting an open, adversarial validator set. That trade-off, known participants and configurable visibility in exchange for giving up permissionless access, is still why most enterprise blockchain pilots that reach production use Fabric or a similar permissioned design rather than a public chain.

LF Decentralized Trust has kept adding projects since the September 2024 launch: in November 2025 it took on Paladin, a privacy-preserving token platform for EVM chains originally built by Kaleido, as a new Labs project. The direction is broader than the five we covered in 2018: identity, privacy tooling and EVM compatibility now sit alongside the original ledger frameworks.

Where Fabric still shows up in production

The use cases that made Hyperledger attractive in the first place, supply-chain traceability, trade-finance document sharing between banks, and claims data shared across insurers, are still the cases where Fabric's channel model earns its complexity. Walmart's produce-traceability system and the trade-finance platforms that replaced closed networks like we.trade and TradeLens both run on permissioned ledgers for the same reason: the participants are known, competitors need selective visibility into the same data, and public-chain throughput and gas costs were never the constraint. We cover that pattern in more detail in our articles on blockchain in supply chain management and blockchain in trade finance.

What this means for picking a permissioned-ledger stack in 2026

• Hyperledger Fabric is the only one of the five under active, well-funded development today, and the default choice for a new consortium deployment; Fabric-X is worth watching but not yet for a production system with regulatory requirements.
• Hyperledger Indy (via Indy Besu) remains the project to evaluate for decentralized identity specifically, though the identity space has moved toward EVM-compatible implementations rather than Indy's original custom ledger.
• Burrow and Sawtooth are archived; their code is usable but unmaintained, and neither should be the starting point for a new build.
• Iroha 2 is promising on paper but still pre-release; plan for that if you pick it.

4IRE has built permissioned-ledger systems for supply chain, trade finance and insurance clients; our blockchain consulting team can help assess whether Fabric, a public-chain alternative, or a hybrid design fits a specific enterprise use case. For smart-contract work on permissioned infrastructure, see our smart contract development services.