'Blockchain Is Really Democratizing a Lot of Things,' Interview With Marta Piekarska, Director of Hyperledger's Ecosystem

All the members of Hyperledger - including such major actors as Intel, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Alibaba Cloud, Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom and many others - find their interest in blockchain technology and discuss it with Marta Piekarska, who is in charge of the project's ecosystem.

We met Marta at the Anon Blockchain Summit in Vienna and talked about computer science, conservative vs. progressive sectors of economy, Hyperledger's community and her favorite books.

Hyperledger started three years ago to bring enterprises and the open-source community to work together on blockchain tools and frameworks.

There is a lot that can be done in the blockchain space to support your development of products, solutions, etc.

On the other hand, I think that blockchain is really democratizing a lot of things; it is democratizing the startup world.

In terms of the general blockchain space, I think the biggest challenge today is a lack of objective experts.

You have payments on a blockchain throughout health care, you have medical health record management, you have prescriptions on a blockchain.

It was done in China, it is from Blockchain Energy Labs, and it is tracking CO2 emission through a blockchain.

Of course, one of the big things in energy - the next big thing, I think - will be a merge of IoT and the management of those independent devices, because blockchain there is very important.

In terms of courses or learning blockchain, I quite value our Hyperledger Blockchain course, which we have free of charge online on edX. There are two types of it, there is a high-level one, and there is one that gets you into coding.