Hyperledger has announced that is adding a new blockchain, this one named Quilt, to its roster of distributed ledger innovation projects.

Hyperledger Quilt was initiated 18 months ago and is an implementation of the Interledger Protocol, also known as ILP. The protocol helps to facilitate transactions across ledgers, trying to ease the process of making and receiving payments when the sender and recipient live in different countries or are using different networks.

The ILP website describes the protocol as providing for:

“…routing payments across different digital asset ledgers while isolating senders and receivers from the risk of intermediary failures. Secure multi-hop payments and automatic routing enables a global network of networks for different types of value that can connect any sender with any receiver.”

Quilt can be seen as an enterprise grade implementation of ILP.

In a blog post on its website, the organisation states that:

“The idea is that Quilt will become a ledger interoperability solution for Hyperledger projects. This will enable Hyperledger members’ distributed ledger solutions, financial institutions’ private ledgers, IoT companies’ wallets, and supply chain systems to connect with one another to perform distributed atomic transactions.”

What is Quilt?

Today’s ledger systems are siloed and disconnected, meaning that while transfers in the same geographical space or network are relatively easy, it can get tricky if these conditions are not met.

Connections that do exist between separate ledgers are often slow, manual and expensive.

Developed in Java, Quilt will provide libraries and reference implementations of the core interledger components. Ledger integrations for the other Hyperledger projects will be added down the road.

Quilt, by utilising ILP, will give businesses a set of rules for “enabling ledger interoperability with basic escrow semantics”. It will also enable connectors to route payments by providing a standard for a ledger-independent address format and data packet format.

Hyperledger members Everis, NTT, DATA and Ripple will be committing full-time engineering resources to the project.

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