Luke: you’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Daniela Barbosa, who serves as a general manager of the decentralized technologies at the Linux Foundation and executive director at the LF Decentralized Trust. She has over 20 years of enterprise technology experience, including seven years at driving collaborative global development of enterprise grade blockchain and identity technologies at the Hyperledger Foundation.

She has a leading voice for the power of openly decentralized technologies to spur efficiency, privacy, and inclusivity. We sat down with Danielle live at the Rare EVO Conference in Las Vegas to discuss how LF decentralized trust fits within the Linux Foundation and why it’s important, the way they decide which technologies to support and prioritize tips for how builders can get involved with open source projects and what is still misunderstood about open source blockchain technology today.

And now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist.

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Luke: [00:01:00] Danielle, Welcome to the Brave Technologist. How are you doing today?

Daniela: I’m doing great. Thank you for having me. Yeah,

Luke: Thanks for coming on. we’re here at Rare Evo you’re one of the speakers. What message are you hoping to share with the community during your talk?

Daniela: Uh, So, our talk is really about web two and Web3. Like how do you bring the web two community into the Web3 ecosystem, especially in the enterprise space. So I think, we at. Linux Foundation, decentralized trust for the last 10 years have been working with enterprise communities to have them basically build Web3 applications and services.

Awesome. So we’re very excited. This is my third rare evo. Nice. It’s a great event for developers and really having, you know, on the floor conversations with developers who are building and wanna build decentralized technology. So it’s fantastic.

Luke: Awesome. Yeah, for those new to it what is the, the Linux Foundation?

Decentralized trust and, and how does it fit into the broader Linux Foundation?

Daniela: Yeah, so the Linux Foundation, decentralized trust is an umbrella of [00:02:00] projects that are decentralized technologies. So this includes blockchain ledgers decentralized identity cryptography projects, and other tooling for blockchain implementations, primarily with enterprises in mind.

Okay. So the Linux Foundation for the last 30 years has been the. Home of the most important open source projects. I would say obviously the Linux kernel, where our namesake is from, but anything from cloud computing with Kubernetes, et cetera. And 10 years ago we started a project at the time was called Hyperledger.

Mm-hmm. The Hyperledger Project really focused on blockchain. Knowing that blockchain from a technology perspective was really going to be important for enterprise use cases across. All industries, not just digital assets and tokenization, but supply chain and healthcare government infrastructure, et cetera.

So for the last 10 years, our community has been quietly building essentially the core ledgers and protocols and tooling that enterprises are now deploying which is really fantastic to see. Awesome.

Luke: Awesome. Yeah. So, Linux [00:03:00] Foundation decentralized Trust launched nearly a year ago. What wins or progress have stand out?

in that time.

Daniela: Sure. So what we did last year is I mentioned, 10 years ago we started the Hyperledger project. Yeah. We expanded the mission and charter of the blockchain projects at the Linux Foundation because we really saw, and our community was building towards, it is no longer just blockchain and ledgers.

Mm-hmm. Right. The importance of decentralized identity, the importance of. Privacy preserving technologies all these things. We are now under decentralized technology, so under LF decentralized trust. Over the last year, we’ve had lots of new projects coming in, but very important. The projects have been with us for, you know, some for 10 years.

Mm-hmm. Continue to mature, continue to innovate in the market. So for example, Hyperledger Fabric just recently released a new Hyperledger fabric X version that is really focused on digital assets and scalability and privacy. Mm-hmm. The things that production implementations need nowadays.

Right, [00:04:00] right. Projects like Bezu. Bezu is an Ethereum virtual machine. Bezu now runs 16% of the Ethereum main net. Wow. So if you think about the value of the Ethereum main net and all the activity there, it’s huge. 16% of that is run as an execution client with Bezu, but Bezos also used by the majority of the large financial services in their EVM.

Implementation. Mm-hmm. So, for example, city was just on stage talking about city token services and that is built using Bezo as well. So the existing projects that have been with us for a while have been growth quite a while. We also have some great new projects that we brought in last year. So, for example.

Hiro which is the code base that runs the Hedera Layer one network. Mm-hmm. So if you’re familiar with Hedera, it’s a public layer one. The entire code base is now under LFDT. Wow. And we ~~built ~~are building a community around that. That’s really important. ‘cause that’s actually the first layer one. That has contributed their entire code base to a neutral foundation.

Wow. Wow. In the case, the Linux Foundation, that’s huge. Many other, you know, layer ones and [00:05:00] foundations, they’ll launch their own foundation to host the code. But really bringing it open to a neutral foundation for true open governance. I think really you know, Hedera took a leadership role in that as well.

Other things from identity perspective. Mm-hmm. I can go on and on and on. No, no, no. Please do. That’s why you’re here. I’ll tell you a couple ones. From a decentralized identity perspective we’re obviously here at, at rare Evo, so a big carano ecosystem. Mm-hmm. We have a project called Hyperledger Ient.

Mm-hmm. That came in last spring. Hyperledger Ient is uh, think of it as a toolkit for decentralized identity systems. And it’s part of the lace wallet. Okay. Part of that implementation is how they do decentralized identity on that. So a great new project. We had a workshop yesterday here at the Rare EVO that was very well attended.

~~Awesome. Lots of folks have been coming by to learn more about a dentists, so it’s really good to see, ~~overall we understand that projects and implementations, especially enterprises, you need to have. Tooling, for example. Yeah. So we have a project called Hyperledger Firefly. Mm-hmm. That really think of it as a super hub, a Web3 super hub or middleware for deploying these applications.

Just recently in the Carano ecosystem, there’s now a plugin for Firefly, for the Carano ecosystem. Oh, awesome. But we also support all of them, Ethereum. Solana Polygon, right? It is a multi chain world, and we, you know, our tooling supports that quite a bit. So you see a lot of enhancements in, in that thing.

The other thing that I like to highlight, you know, over the last year and the exciting, especially this week is the work that’s happening around privacy. So specifically, how to deal with privacy from an enterprise perspective. Also individual privacy, really [00:06:00] important as these things scale go into production and essentially become core to everything that we do.

Yeah, day in, day out as well. So we have a lab called Paladin that’s been in the foundation for since last fall. As well that is basically working on programmable privacy. And just yesterday we announced that the Midnight Foundation has contributed their midnight contracts smart contract language called Compact Midnight Compact, which is obviously focused on privacy as well.

And we’re happy to welcome Shielded technologies, the technology company behind midnight Foundation as a premier member of our foundation. So we’re really, really expanding. Continuously the ecosystems that enterprises are interested in building on and building with as well. So we’re very excited about that.

Yeah, so I think that kind of gives you No, that’s fantastic. A nice overview. It’s

Luke: amazing breadth of, of things that are happening there. Especially great to hear about the privacy front too, because, there is, there’s, there’s their consumer user privacy and then there’s also enterprise. They are, you know, there’s some overlap, but, but there [00:07:00] are some important differences there.

So it’s great to see the feedback. Yeah.

Daniela: And you know, as we see more like the financial institutions right. going into production and thinking about these use cases, privacy is gonna continuously being an important topic. Mm-hmm. And many in our ecosystem have been working on it for a while.

And it’s really great to like see these technologies now being implemented and, you know, and in our community being discussed being worked across different projects, right? So what we truly do at the foundation is we bring these developers and the ecosystems that they’re part. Together mm-hmm.

To solve the big problems. Awesome. Right. And how do we solve those problems without having to rebuild the same thing over and over again. Mm-hmm. You know, I talk about all this all the time. Our community really works on the plumbing. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. The non-sexy stuff. Right. Make it work.

Make it work well. Yeah. And make it work so that the developers and the application builders spend time building. The, the things that matter to the user and the use cases and the plumbing just kind of works. Yes. And it works well.

Luke: Everything that you need. [00:08:00] And, and you don’t realize you need until you, something breaks or until you realize you.

Daniela: Exactly. Yeah.

Luke: Exactly. Is, is that kind of the strength of bringing, ledger identity and trust all under one umbrella? Is that kind of. Plumbing like aspect? what is the strength to bring it all under one?

Daniela: Yeah. I mean, I think once again is, is sometimes people do not think about topics of privacy or people are not leading with the decentralized identity.

Mm-hmm. And the importance of decentralized identity in a decentralized network space. Mm-hmm. So I think having developers, having people in the same ecosystem working together brings that cross-pollination. Of knowledge cross pollination of, you know, people have been working on digital identity technologies for, for years.

Yeah. for 10, 15, 20 years. And people have been working on blockchain ledger technology for years as well. Right. And we’re able to convene everybody kind of in the room together mm-hmm. To talk about these things. The other thing, the power of the Linux Foundation, the centralized trust is [00:09:00] convening companies.

Large companies, governments the very long tail of, small and medium sized startups together in the room to talk about real requirements. Yeah. Right. And we do it in a very neutral way. Mm-hmm. And, large companies feel comfortable. We have antitrust policies the way that we do our, all our meetings and stuff, and it really helps people, competitors, primarily Yeah.

Get in the room and solve for problems. Yeah. Because, you know, they are competing. For billions and billions of dollars of money. Right, right, right. Revenue. Right, right, right. But they can get in the room and solve problems together. Mm-hmm. And that’s the, the, the strength of the Linux Foundation, not just at LFDT, around decentralized technologies, but across all technologies as well.

Luke: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And I know you’ve mentioned several different areas where things especially in the last year have developed is there one Linux Foundation project you think more people in Web3 should really know about?

Daniela: it’s kind of like asking me like, which one is your favorite child?

I had a feeling after, after the [00:10:00] earlier

Luke: one, but I thought I would go with it anyway.

Daniela: It is, you know, I think that the key thing is, once again, joining and participating in an open source foundation like LF decentralized trust. Yeah. Engineers, developers for sure. But not only that, we have a lot of people who are, professional um, services folks.

Yeah. Or they are builders and, product application, you know, product management, et cetera. So coming into the foundation and, and kind of. Seeing the work that’s happening, I think is really important. Mm-hmm. And then making a decision as to, hey, you know, what are the key things that I can provide value to as well.

Decentralized identity, I would say is the thing that if, if the audience is not familiar with, I would recommend taking a look at it. Yeah. Because it’s going to be continuously more and more important for all these decentralized, networks. Yeah. And it’s not just people, right. It’s.

Companies. Yeah. Right. How dis you know, how identity from a company perspective and more and more also things like agent ai. [00:11:00] Yeah. Right. How do you have an AI bot who is working on your behalf. Right? How do you allow. Selective disclosure of what that bot will let people know about yourself.

Right. So one of the things is thinking about privacy and decentralized identity is how can I have a verifiable credential, for example that verifies for example, my age? Mm-hmm. And you can give me a drink, but you don’t have to know exactly how old I am. Right. ‘cause I’m way older than 21.

But, you know, that’s always a simple way. Sure. But if you think a simple example that I like to use, but if you think about it, that’s gonna just continue being more and more important. Mm-hmm. Especially when agents are, going around on our behalf doing things as well. But even

Luke: now, I mean, like, if you think about you know, whether it’s.

State level or even like, some of these national age verification types of things and, and ways to kind of handle that where you’re not having to put people’s personal data at such a great risk or across so many different parties, right? Mm-hmm. Like in, it seems like there’s a, a good amount of relevance there.

Now you talk about a big tent, [00:12:00] right? and you’ve got this big organization, a lot of moving parts, a lot of different parties involved. I’m really curious, like how do you decide, or how does the, the, the trust kind of decide? How they prioritize things in, in that, under that big of an umbrella.

Yeah.

Daniela: So it’s a great question. And actually it’s not for us to prioritize, right? It’s the community. Excellent. Everything is really community led. Mm-hmm. So if you, if you look at the foundation LF decentralized Trust is a foundation. We have members, so members join the foundation to help support the work that we do.

And we have community contributors. Mm-hmm. And even, for example, our technical advisory committee these are volunteers. Now, they may work for companies who pay them to do contributions to an open source foundation, but they’re essentially volunteers. Mm-hmm. And they are the ones that look and see like what projects are interesting.

So we have a very detailed and open, and you can take, go and take a look at it. Project lifecycle. When projects come in, they might come into our lab. So it’s like a playground where we have. Over a hundred labs [00:13:00] in there. Oh, wow. Um, 50 that are very active mm-hmm. Where communities are driving those code projects to move forward.

And we have labs that then become graduated and incubated projects as well. Mm-hmm. And it’s important to have that environment because innovation moves so fast. Oh, yeah. That, by allowing people to come together to work on projects, sometimes pet projects that they have. It really drives that.

So we don’t tell people, Hey, you’re a project and you come in and do it. People come in, they start working on a lab, or they have a project proposal, and the technical advisory committee are the ones that look at it and say, okay, is this a good fit for our charter and mission?

Mm-hmm. At LF decentralized trust as well. Over the last, What we’re seeing is a lot of ecosystems that in the past we’re not interested in going to talk to an enterprise, what they would consider an enterprise open source foundation. Right? ‘cause they kind of the Web3 ethos of like, well, we’re not, we don’t, we’re not interested in what’s going on in the enterprise this way.

But we’re seeing more and more in layer one ecosystems [00:14:00] and layer two ecosystems coming to us and saying, Hey, we have this code project. We would really like to have a community around it. Can you help us get there? And that’s really what the foundation does. That’s

Luke: great. No, that’s great to hear too.

And, and yeah, it’s a great distinction too about, community kind of like setting the priorities. Mm-hmm. You know, I think people, they see a big organization, they, don’t necessarily process it that way. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like, and they think, okay, who are these people that are making all these decisions?

But how can you ensure. That the technologies you support are developed in ways that are secure, neutral, and widely adaptable. Mm-hmm. Because I feel like I, that’s to be a good theme throughout. This is the neutrality and kind of community led, but, I think, are there processes or, rules or conditions or something like that that kind of help to make sure that this is done in a secure way?

Like.

Daniela: Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that’s really important with open source code, that’s what I call enterprise grade. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t mean that just enterprises use it, right? Or just government uses, anyone can use it, but enterprise grade, right? Mm-hmm. Which means that if someone is picking up that code.

[00:15:00] To build an application to building a platform or anything that they do, they understand the process that code has been developed. Mm-hmm. And governed. Mm-hmm. Right. So we talk about the concept of there’s open source, right? And anyone can take their code and put it in GitHub and. Put in an open source license and say, Hey, we are now an open source and everyone can take a look at the code.

Right? And maybe even people can submit issues and bugs and even, requests, pull requests for specific code. But essentially the maintainers of that code base are very centralized, right? They work for a company and. How decisions are made are sometimes not very transparent. Right, right, right.

So at the Linux Foundation and LF decentralized trust, we really focus on is the open governance and the open development of these open source code bases. Mm-hmm. And in order to do that, you have to have very best practices around open governance and how, how do you document. How a contributor contributes.

How do you document how [00:16:00] a contributor becomes a maintainer of the code base? How do you very in the open do your roadmap Yeah. Your project roadmap. Yeah. Right. How do people understand where things are coming in? So the Linux Foundation for the last 30 years has been doing this across all technologies.

Mm-hmm. And blockchain and digital identity projects are no different. Right. That core governance is still needed. So for us, that’s really important, but it’s not me and it’s not my staff. Right. Once again, it’s the com it’s community driven. Yeah. We have that technical advisory committee where they, the tech essentially has.

Open source experts who’ve been doing open source for many, many, many, many years. Some of the biggest companies, but also some of the smaller companies. Mm-hmm. And they understand the importance of that governance, of making sure we all our projects, for example, do quarterly reports up to the technical advisory committee to report on the work that they’ve done.

Yeah. There’s a project life cycle and in order to go from incubated status, for example, to graduated [00:17:00] status. You have to follow specific requirements, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that needs to get done. So, it’s really important on the governance side to do that. And that helps with things like security requirements.

Sure. Right. And back to why would an enterprise, why would Citi right, or DTCC or a central bank pick up a code base that sits under LF decentralized trust and maybe not a code base that sits under some Web3 company is ‘cause they understand. By having under the Linux Foundation, what do you get? You get those best practices under open source practices.

You get essentially a vendor neutral code base. Mm-hmm. And what that means is multiple vendors can help support the development and implementation and the usage of that code base. And that’s really important. Yeah. Why? Right now we have governments. And very large financial institutions as to say on the finance side and on the government side, building infrastructure.

That is going to be used by you and me. Mm-hmm. [00:18:00] But it’s also gonna be used by our kids mm-hmm. And our grandkids. So it’s really important that, that infrastructure, right. Is whether it’s digital assets, whether it is a credentialing a digital credential, ID system. Yeah. In, in the government is built using open source code that is openly governed and developed.

That has a neutral vendor ecosystem. Right? Right. ‘cause otherwise, you know what will happen. right, right.

Luke: Exactly.

Daniela: So that’s what the Linux Foundation does, and that’s why, a lot of new code projects want to come in because they wanna be in that level playing field of saying, you know, we have our code in our community.

Ready to be deployed in these kind of systems.

Luke: I love it. It’s like taking kind of like, okay, it’s, it’s so much more than just an open source code base. It’s kind of like, greater accountability, higher integrity, kind of through and through the process, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like if, yeah.

And the other

Daniela: thing that we do, we spend a lot of time, and resources on this is training and education. ‘cause you need to have. [00:19:00] Developers and engineers and builders who understand the code. Yeah. So, the Linux Foundation has, you know, essentially certified millions and millions of developers across many, many different projects.

The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, et cetera. And we do the same for the blockchain projects. Mm-hmm. And the identity projects is how do we make sure that when these things go into production. A large company, you know, can essentially hire engineers mm-hmm. That are certified in this technology. Right. So that’s an important element of it as well.

Yeah. It’s

Luke: huge. Yeah. Mm-hmm. What do you think is the uh, most misunderstood about the open source blockchain environment today?

Daniela: Yeah. You know, it’s a good question. One that, over the last few days people have asked me quite a bit I think an important distinction to understand is we are a developer ecosystem.

Mm-hmm. Right? What we do is essentially three things. One is we make those developers happy, we give them the tools to be successful, right? We make sure that they have, you know, opportunities to do workshops and webinars and like the kind of stuff that we’re doing here at [00:20:00] Rear Evo. And the tooling.

For them to do their, their work. The education that I mentioned. Right. Yeah. Making sure there’s PLAs on that and making sure that there’s a real healthy commercial ecosystem mm-hmm. Supporting these open source projects. Mm-hmm. Many people think, well I can’t make money on off of open source. Right.

But if you look at some of the biggest technology companies, what they do is make money off of open source. Right? Right. Exactly. And they contribute to these projects, right? They certainly do. But open source doesn’t need no revenue. Right. So, you know, one of them is. Conceptions is people are like, well, I don’t wanna contribute my code ‘cause I’m never gonna make money off of it.

Mm-hmm. Or you know, how do I make money off an open source code base because somebody’s just gonna build the same thing and, you know, eat my lunch. Right. And that’s not the case. Right. There’s really, really strong. Reports to the Linux Foundation website, you can see around how do you make money using open source and contributing to open source.

So that’s kind of one of the things that you know, I usually tell people that’s a myth of open source. Uh, it’s a

Luke: great point. It’s a great point. ‘cause it’s a total misconception that’s out there around like, oh, you’re, you’re, you’re just, you know, people are just this [00:21:00] tribe of volunteers that are, doing it out of.

The goodness of their heart kind of thing. But it’s like, not so much more than that. yeah. a lot of people builders may be listening. Might find this all very appealing. Want to get involved. How can builders or users get involved with your project?

Daniela: Yeah, so it’s really easy.

Everything we do is open. Mm-hmm. Anyone can show up. We always, you know, if you’re not involved in an open source community already, jump into one of a, the meetings or the special interest groups, or the working groups, or the meetups? We have hundreds. We have a community of over 180,000 meetup participants.

Wow. Over, like every week you can join on a meetup and, around the world and different topics, lurk sometimes I’m like, well, I don’t know how to say it. Just lurk. Just listen. See what peoples do, how they interact. And there’s plenty of places to do. And once again, it’s not just developers.

Mm-hmm. Like product managers and marketing people and dev, you know, dev community managers, et cetera. So, for us, show up and, and get involved. If you go obviously to our website LFT, centralized Trusters a [00:22:00] section on how to participate. Excellent. And that actually takes you through like.

Just participation at one level. And then how do you become a contributor? How do you become a maintainer? We have all our projects have things like first issues that people can get involved in. So if you’re a developer and you’re interested in contributing, you can go look at first issues and you can say, okay, hey, is this something I can fix?

Or this is something I can contribute to. So making sure that those easy pathways are available and we spend a lot of time making sure that happens. So if you’re a developer. Come on our website, check out the how to participate, go to how to become a contributor. And there’s gonna be the pathways to getting involved in an open source community.

Luke: Fantastic. Is there anything we didn’t cover that you would like our audience to know about? What, what’s going on with the with the trust?

Daniela: Yeah. So I think, you know, the ecosystems, whether it’s the carano ecosystem, the Hadera ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem are such a. diverse ecosystem that I think has a lot of commonality between it.

Mm-hmm. And one of [00:23:00] the things that I truly believe that LF Decentralized Trust and the Linux Foundation as a whole does, is bring communities together. Mm-hmm. And we’re starting to see a lot of that cross collaboration together. So, I would say, keep an eye on projects that are coming into the foundation if you yourself have a project.

And a community that you would like to bring to the Linux Foundation, decentralized trust, come and talk to us. We’d love to talk to you. And we have set up the foundation so that it would be the place for people to come to co collaborate on these projects. So yeah, we’re, we’re open for business.

We’re gonna about celebrate our one year anniversary as LF Decentralized Trust, but our 10th year anniversary in blockchain and digital identity at the Linux Foundation. So, it’s happening.

Luke: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been great conversation. I encourage everybody to check out your work, and yeah, thank you for kind of letting us know about all this.

This is really, really fantastic. I think what you all are doing is really great. I think bring communities together. There’s never been a time where that’s more needed than right now, especially without tribal, this space can be. Mm-hmm. And yeah, I [00:24:00] really commend you all for all the work you’re doing and love to have you all back to you to kind of like revisit how things are going.

And congratulations on the one in 10 years. Wonderful. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast.

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