Charles Hoskinson Announces ‘Gerolamo,’ Linking Cardano and Enterprise Blockchain Atala

IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson has announced “Gerolamo,” an interoperability system that links its public blockchain Cardano with its enterprise blockchain Atala.

In the past, IOHK has served enterprise clients that wanted to use the Cardano blockchain, but who were not prepared to rely on a public blockchain for regulatory, legal, and business reasons.

He says that the usual solution for those needs is Hyperledger Fabric, which is “basically a permission ledger infrastructure” that offers enterprises permissioned control over the ledger’s consensus method. Enterprise chains are different from Cardano, in which any participant can contribute to consensus.

Hoskinson also says that IOHK previously created Atala, a permissioned blockchain for enterprise users. He adds that Atala is not entirely separate from public, permissionless blockchains and that the two types of chain are interoperable.

Hoskinson says that IOHK is currently working with the Hyperledger Foundation to turn the Cardano-to-Atala workflow described above into a “turnkey system” that enterprises can easily deploy. He says:

We’re going to unify [the ecosystem] in 2021 … some of this have to do with unifying permissioned and permissionless [chains] together … If we get approval in 2021 we’re going to call this “Gerolamo,” because that was the first name of Cardano.

He adds that Gerolamo will compete with Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth, though it will also exist as a Hyperledger product in its own right. It appears that the partnership has been underway since June.

Government and enterprise partnerships are one of IOHK’s main pursuits at the moment. Hoskinson says that IOHK’s contract with Georgia brings in 50,000 new users each year. Given that Cardano still has few applications available to the public, Gerolamo’s enterprise appeal could be quite important.