LF Decentralized Trust Marks One Year Anniversary with New Members, Hiero Graduation, and Smart Contract Privacy Project

Adds Etherealize, Ethereum Foundation, Nethermind, and SOOHO.IO as General Members; Blockchain for Energy, Deutsche Bundesbank, and Keri Foundation as Associate Members

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LF Decentralized Trust), the premier open source foundation for decentralized technology, announced Etherealize, Ethereum Foundation, Nethermind, and SOOHO.IO as new general members and Blockchain for Energy, Deutsche Bundesbank, and Keri Foundation as associate members. The new member line-up represents the continued diversity of support and development underway at LF Decentralized Trust, which just marked its first anniversary.

LF Decentralized Trust is home to a growing and maturing ecosystem of enterprise-grade technologies that meet a spectrum of protocol and network needs. The rise of complex, multi-protocol implementations in the financial market will be a key topic at Sibos. On day one of the conference, Swift's annual event for the global financial service industry, Daniela Barbosa, LF Decentralized Trust Executive Director, will be part of a keynote panel on How public and permissioned networks are converging. 

The LF Decentralized Trust community and ecosystem are growing and innovating to facilitate these converging and complex networks. This includes:

Hiero Graduation
Hiero, the ledger technology project contributed by Hedera when LF Decentralized Trust launched, achieved graduated status, an important milestone in an open source project. Projects are approved for graduation by LF Decentralized Trust's Technical Advisory Council based on an evaluation of a range of criteria, including neutral governance, production readiness, compliance with security standard and development best practices, and level of adoption. 

See more from leaders in both the Hedera and LF Decentralized Trust ecosystem about this milestone here.

New Smart Contract Privacy Project: Minokawa
Initially developed and maintained by the team at Shielded Technologies, the Compact smart contract language and its associated tooling are now a new LF Decentralized Trust project named Minokawa. Conceived to abstract the complexity of ZK technology in a way that is both familiar and accessible to developers, Minokawa expands the LF Decentralized Trust ecosystem with a contract model that natively supports private state and logic as well as public state and logic.

Momentum in the Ethereum ecosystem
The new general members all point to the growing impact of another ledger project, Besu. An enterprise Ethereum client, Besu plays a key role both for the mainnet, responsible for 16% of all execution clients, and in permissioned networks around the world. 

Underscoring the importance of Besu and other LF Decentralized Trust technologies to the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum Foundation, which has been part of the community since joining Hyperledger as an associate member in 2019, has now upgraded to general membership. And new member SOOHO.IO has already completed the requirements to qualify as the newest Besu Certified Service Provider.

A new addition to the LF Decentralized Trust case study library highlights Besu's role as the backbone of public sector blockchain networks. It includes details on Besu deployments in the European Commission's European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI); LACChain, Latin America's regional blockchain ecosystem launched by International Development Bank Labs; and Rede Blockchain Brasil (RBB), the national transparency initiative supported by Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES).

Associate Member Diversity
The line-up of new associate members also reflect the breath of applications and use cases for LF Decentralized Trust projects. The code and standards work underway in Besu, Hyperledger Cacti, Hyperledger Fabric, Hiero, and Trust over IP are central to the developments and deployments for these organizations.

Deutsche Bundesbank, a leading contributor to the Eurosystem's activities around digital euro and wholesale CBDC, is the 9th central bank to join LF Decentralized Trust.

"As fast paced as the first year for LF Decentralized Trust was, we only see innovation, adoption, and collaboration accelerating from here," said Daniela Barbosa, General Manager, Decentralized Technologies, Linux Foundation, and Executive Director, LF Decentralized Trust. "Our open development and governance model is uniting a market around neutral platforms and technologies that are rapidly transforming financial markets, government infrastructure, identity, and overall trust. Our members fuel our work, helping us lead collaborative development of an extensive landscape of ledger technologies as well as powerful tools for privacy, interoperability, identity, authentication, and more."

General Member Quotes
The support of LF Decentralized Trust's members is what makes it a neutral home for technical collaboration and innovation:

"Open standards are the only way to connect capital markets at internet scale. Etherealize is building interoperable, privacy‑preserving rails for tokenized assets so institutions can transact securely, compliantly, and in real time. Joining LF Decentralized Trust gives this work a neutral, open forum to ensure global adoption and impact as we move the industry from pilots to production." - Danny Ryan, President, Etherealize

"Decentralized technologies have the potential to reshape how we organize society and the economy, but only if they're developed as public goods rather than proprietary systems. Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust is committed to open development and building software that benefits everyone. This collaborative approach is essential for creating infrastructure the world can trust." - James Smith, Head of Ecosystem, Ethereum Foundation

"Nethermind is a long-standing builder of Ethereum infrastructure, and we're bringing our deep strengths in blockchain protocol engineering, privacy, applied research, security, and core Ethereum client development to LF Decentralized Trust. By collaborating within the Linux Foundation's open, neutral governance model, we aim to accelerate enterprise-grade Ethereum adoption - especially across global financial institutions - and help steward resilient, secure, interoperable systems that can thrive at production scale." - Antonio Sabado, Chief Growth Officer, Nethermind

"We are honored to join Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as a Certified Service Provider, representing a significant milestone in SOOHO.IO's mission to advance enterprise blockchain adoption. Our experience building CBDC-based digital voucher systems for the Bank of Korea has demonstrated the critical importance of secure, compliant blockchain infrastructure for government and financial institutions. We look forward to collaborating with the international community to establish the technical standards and best practices that will enable a safe, efficient digital asset ecosystem worldwide." - said Jisu Park, CEO and Founder, SOOHO.IO

About Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust
LF Decentralized Trust is the neutral home for the open development of technologies that empower organizations to innovate with secure and resilient code. It is the Linux Foundation's flagship organization for a broad range of technologies and standards that deliver the transparency, reliability, security, and efficiency required for a digital-first economy. Supported by a diverse, global base of members and communities, LF Decentralized Trust champions open source best practices across a growing ecosystem of blockchain, ledger, identity, cryptographic, and related technologies. To learn more, visit: www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, LF Decentralized Trust, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, Zephyr, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Contact:
Emily Fisher
LF Decentralized Trust
[email protected]

SOURCE LF Decentralized Trust