Nominee Name

Jim Zhang

Nominated By

Self

Short personal bio

Jim is the Co-Founder and Head of Protocol Engineering of Kaleido, the creator of Hyperledger FireFly. He has been involved in the permissioned blockchain space since early 2016, starting with the development of Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 as a committer and responsible for the node.js SDK and the node.js chaincode engine. Jim was also the creator of the Fabric connection profile which is a critical component for various client SDKs to function.

Jim co-founded Kaleido in late 2017 after exiting from his 17-year career at IBM as the lead architect of the IBM Blockchain Platform. Since then he has spent a lot of time in the JPMorgan Quorum and ConsenSys Pantheon (which later became Hyperledger Besu) communities, contributing both code and ideas. He has also been active in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance technical working group, co-authoring multiple versions (v2, v3, v4, v5) of the EEA Client and Blockchain Technical Specifications.

At Kaleido Jim is responsible for the platform's support of all the blockchain protocols including Quorum, Besu, go-ethereum, Corda and Fabric, as well as advanced technologies such as Atomic Swaps (based on Hash Timed Lock Contracts), Zero Knowledger Proof tokens (based on zether) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

As part of his work with teams from Intel, iExec and ConsenSys on the TEE based trusted token project, Jim became one of the core contributors to the code base that launched Hyperledger Avalon.

Jim has written extensively about the permissioned blockchain protocols, his deep technical analysis on Enterprise Ethereum vs. Fabric vs. Corda has been a popular authoritative source for protocol evaluations.

Most recently, Jim has authored the Fabric Connector for Hyperledger FireFly as a key component to add Fabric support in FireFly.

Short personal pitch

I would like to nominate myself to serve on the Technical Steering Committee. I will be a voice for the Hyperledger FireFly project and other projects that I have been involved in (including Avalon, Besu, Fabric, Iroha), as well as technologies that are critical to the successful adoption of blockchains such as interoperability (a proposal on interop for permissioned blockchains that I co-authored at Kaleido recently got awarded a National Science Foundation grant) and Decentralized Identities (I worked with the W3C DID working group members to add DID support to the first version of the EEA Permissioned Blockchains Specifications). As my personal bio above shows, I have unique strengths in having hands-on experiences in many technical areas under the Hyperledger umbrella.

If elected as a member of the TSC, I will work with the other members to ensure that we continue to nurture a collection of vibrant technical communities around the top level projects as well as the labs projects, by holding the project leaders responsible for their continued dedication to the vision and success of the projects. At Kaleido for the past 4 years I have got front-row perspective into the struggles of enterprise customers in adopting blockchain and related technologies, as we participated in calls with leaders in both technical and business ranks and strategize on the best route to building and launching the groundbreaking solutions. This is something I can bring to bear as the TSC gives considerations to future proposals for projects and labs, as well as helping current projects and labs that hold the most importance to the success of Hyperledger as a whole.

Last but not least, Asia is a vibrant region in both blockchain technology development and adoption. With my Chinese heritage, fluent in both English and Chinese, and experiences in working with consortium projects in the region (Australia, China, Japan, Thailand) and standard bodies such as CAICT, I can help to connect the talents in that part of the world, and bridge the communication gap in both directions that may exist due to culture and timezone differences.

Thank you for your considerations and support!

Jim Zhang