Reflections from the LF Decentralized Trust 10th Anniversary Summit

This week, attended the 10th Anniversary Member Summit for LF Decentralized Trust in Jersey City, New Jersey. The event marked an important milestone for the ecosystem, but more importantly, it highlighted how far decentralized technologies have progressed in real-world adoption.

The summit brought together leaders from large enterprises, central banks, and the open-source community to share practical experience, production lessons, and perspectives on where the technology is heading. Discussions covered advanced cryptography, decentralized identity, tokenization, and AI accountability, with a consistent emphasis on systems that are already running or moving quickly toward production.

From a DSR perspective, many of these conversations closely align with what we see in client work, particularly as organizations move from proofs of concept to production deployments.

One of the clearest themes was how quickly the line between public and enterprise blockchains is fading. Public networks, particularly Ethereum, are increasingly viewed as foundational trust infrastructure rather than experimental platforms. Much of the conversation focused on how enterprises are using technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, EVM compatibility, and Layer 2 solutions to meet requirements for privacy, scalability, and compliance while still benefiting from public-chain security and decentralization.

Decentralized identity also featured prominently, especially in the context of rapid advances in AI. As AI agents and AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, the ability to verify digital truth is becoming a serious challenge. Decentralized identity is increasingly seen as a practical way to establish trust, verification, and accountability. This mirrors what we are seeing across regulated environments, where identity is becoming a core requirement rather than an optional capability.

Another strong signal from the summit was the maturity of the LFDT project ecosystem. The focus is no longer on experimentation, but on solving concrete adoption challenges such as throughput, security, and operational scalability. Established projects like Hyperledger Besu continue to evolve, while newer efforts such as Fabric-X are pushing performance and modularity further. There is also growing momentum around Hiero, supported by an expanding community and deeper integration with decentralized identity protocols. These platforms are clearly being built with production environments in mind.

Financial services remain the primary driver of adoption across the ecosystem. Representatives from the Bank of Korea, Banque de France, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore shared updates on Central Bank Digital Currency initiatives that are moving beyond pilots and into live deployments. In parallel, large-scale tokenization, particularly for capital markets, is transitioning from proofs of concept to regulated, production-grade systems, a shift we are increasingly supporting in enterprise environments.

Collaboration across projects was another recurring theme. The ecosystem is moving away from isolated platforms toward interoperable systems that work together by default. Examples included running Hyperledger Indy on Besu in production and integrating decentralized identity directly into Hiero. This reflects a broader market expectation for platforms that can bridge privacy, identity, tokenization, and multi-chain interoperability without unnecessary complexity.

Overall, the summit reinforced that the decentralized trust ecosystem has reached an important point of maturity. The industry has moved past theoretical exploration and is now focused on building secure, scalable, and regulated systems that operate in the real world. As AI continues to accelerate and challenge assumptions about digital authenticity, decentralized technologies are becoming essential infrastructure for the next phase of the digital economy.