layout: default title: 2026 Annual Review Hyperledger Iroha parent: 2026 grand_parent: Project Updates

Hyperledger Iroha Annual Report¶

Governance Model Changes¶

There were no material governance-model changes for Hyperledger Iroha in 2025. The project continues to operate under its existing maintainer model, with the active maintainer roster published in the main repository.

Project Lifecycle Status Recommendation¶

Graduated status still makes sense for Hyperledger Iroha.

Project Health¶

2025 was primarily a year of release-candidate delivery, stabilization, and continued architecture work across the shared Iroha codebase.

The repository currently ships two deployment tracks from one codebase:

Hyperledger Iroha 2 for permissioned and consortium deployments.
Hyperledger Iroha 3 (SORA Nexus) for the Nexus-oriented deployment track built on the same core crates.

Throughout 2025, the main repository delivered eight published GitHub releases on the v2.0.0 release-candidate line, from v2.0.0-rc.1.0 through v2.0.0-rc.2.1. The codebase continues to invest in deterministic core infrastructure, including Sumeragi consensus, Norito serialization, the Iroha Virtual Machine (IVM), SDKs, operator tooling, and documentation.

The public documentation portal remains available at docs.iroha.tech, and the repository now includes versioned portal content in addition to the main documentation tree. Community support channels remain available through the LF Decentralized Trust mailing list, the public Telegram community chat, and Discord. In local git history, the main repository recorded 119 commits in calendar year 2025 from 12 unique email identities.

Public activity snapshot (main repository / public signals, as of March 24, 2026 unless otherwise stated):

Signal	Value
GitHub stars	483
GitHub forks	283
GitHub watchers	33
Open GitHub issues	463
Published GitHub releases in 2025	8
Local git commits in calendar year 2025	119
Unique email identities in 2025 git history	12
Current listed maintainers	19

The picture this gives is a project with real ongoing engineering output, visible release activity, and a growing public architecture story, while still being in an important transition period between the established Iroha 2 line and the newer Hyperledger Iroha 3 / Sora Nexus direction.

Hyperledger Iroha 2 / Iroha 3 (Sora Nexus) Transition¶

Work on the Hyperledger Iroha 2 / Iroha 3 split and the Sora Nexus direction began in July 2025. In the main repository, that work became explicitly visible later in 2025 as the shared codebase, documentation, configuration, and roadmap were reorganized around two release lines built from the same workspace.

Hyperledger Iroha 2 remains the self-hosted track for consortium and private-network deployments.
Hyperledger Iroha 3 / Sora Nexus extends the same core platform with multi-lane execution, governance-scoped data spaces, shared settlement and observability, and a broader public-network architecture.

Both versions share the same core building blocks, including the Iroha Virtual Machine (IVM), Kotodama smart contract toolchain, Norito serialization, and the SDK surface.

As of March 24, 2026, Hyperledger Iroha 3 / SORA Nexus should be described as an active pre-release engineering program rather than a finished public rollout. The current repository already contains substantial Nexus-specific functionality, including:

a live public Taira testnet track, announced on March 3, 2026, as the current SORA Nexus integration and pre-production hardening environment;
explicit separation between lane-free Iroha 2 mode and Nexus-enabled mode;
dynamic lane creation and retirement tied to dataspace manifests;
per-lane proofs and merge-ledger handling;
data-availability policy, receipt, and manifest plumbing;
cross-dataspace atomic-transaction support; and
dedicated operator and onboarding documentation.

At the same time, the current roadmap makes clear that the project is still working through launch-readiness items for the first public release, especially runtime validation, soak and stability work, security hardening, and broader operational polish.

The Taira announcement is important because it marks the point where Hyperledger Iroha 3 / SORA Nexus moved from an internal architecture and documentation effort into a public testnet phase. The announcement describes Taira as the first public testnet for SORA Nexus, aimed at validating transaction flow, routing behavior, lane-aware execution, operational observability, and overall readiness before a mainnet rollout. It also describes Taira as the first public showcase of the multilane, multidataspace, IVM, and zk-oriented SORA Nexus model, giving the ecosystem a concrete public environment for integration testing rather than only architecture drafts and roadmap items.

Releases¶

Hyperledger Iroha published eight GitHub releases in 2025:

v2.0.0-rc.1.0 — January 27, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.1.1 — February 13, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.1.2 — March 7, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.1.3 — March 7, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.1.4 — March 13, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.1.5 — March 18, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.2.0 — May 8, 2025
v2.0.0-rc.2.1 — June 5, 2025

An important release-story point is that, in July 2025, the project pivoted toward building a combined Iroha 2 / Iroha 3 codebase around the Iroha Virtual Machine (IVM) rather than treating the next-generation Nexus work as a fully separate product line. That direction was driven by requirements from our central banking users, who wanted one coherent programmable platform that could support both tightly governed permissioned deployments and the emerging public-network / SORA Nexus direction without splitting the virtual-machine, smart-contract, and SDK story.

This is also why the public GitHub release list for 2025 is concentrated on the v2.0.0 release-candidate line in the first half of the year: after the July pivot, more engineering effort moved into the shared Iroha 2 / Iroha 3 architecture, IVM-centered portability, and the Nexus transition path that is now visible in the current repository and testnet work.

This release history reflects steady work on the 2.0 line while the broader shared codebase continued to evolve toward the next operational and architectural milestones.

Maintainer Diversity¶

The current MAINTAINERS.md in the main repository lists 19 maintainers across product ownership, project management, technical leadership, Rust development, SDK/client development, QA, DevOps, and documentation.

This is a healthy cross-functional base for a project of Iroha's scope, but the organizational concentration is still high: 18 of the 19 listed maintainers use soramitsu.co.jp email addresses. However, the contributor set is much broader than the maintainer roster, as visible in the 2025 git history.

The diversity challenge for Iroha is therefore not whether outside contributions exist, but whether more outside contributors can be grown into repeat reviewers, subsystem owners, and eventually maintainers.

Project Adoption¶

Hyperledger Iroha continues to see its clearest public adoption in regulated financial infrastructure and digital-asset platforms.

Publicly disclosed examples include:

Digital Kina, the Bank of Papua New Guinea CBDC proof-of-concept, publicly announced as completed on January 28, 2025 in collaboration with Soramitsu and Japan's METI.
Palau Invest, a blockchain-based savings bond system developed with the Government of Palau.
Bokolo Cash, the Central Bank of Solomon Islands CBDC proof-of-concept, publicly described as running on a Hyperledger Iroha 2-based permissioned blockchain network.

In addition, public reporting in Nikkei Asia and Dawn in August 2025 stated that Soramitsu was working with the State Bank of Pakistan on a CBDC pilot programme. That should be understood as a public signal of ongoing market interest and pilot activity, not as a completed production deployment.

Public Soramitsu materials also describe additional Iroha-based digital-currency and financial-infrastructure work across the Asia-Pacific region. The project's main strength continues to be deployments that need deterministic behavior, permissioned governance, programmable assets, and strong operator control.

The public adoption pattern is therefore fairly coherent: Iroha is strongest in CBDC, regulated financial infrastructure, and government-adjacent digital asset systems where policy control and operational determinism matter more than permissionless-network branding.

Community Engagement¶

The main public community touchpoints remain:

LF Decentralized Trust mailing list
Telegram community chat (https://t.me/hyperledgeriroha)
Discord
X account (https://x.com/hl_iroha)
GitHub issues and pull requests
The public documentation portal at docs.iroha.tech

The Telegram community chat remains the clearest real-time public coordination channel for users and builders. The Taira public testnet should improve this story materially in 2026 because it gives integrators, operators, and SDK teams an actual public environment against which to test wallets, services, routing, and operational assumptions.

The project also held a public Hyperledger Iroha X Space, which is useful evidence that community engagement is starting to move beyond static channels and into more active public discussion formats.

This is still an area where Iroha should become stronger. The next step is to turn these channels and the public testnet into a more regular cadence of release notes, public demos, operator onboarding, and contributor-facing updates.

Goals¶

Performance Against Prior Goals¶

The prior annual report emphasized transaction fees, hub-chain / public-network evolution, and broader documentation/ecosystem growth. Our assessment is:

Transaction-fee support: IN PROGRESS
The current codebase contains meaningful fee-related groundwork, fee-aware runtime/configuration work, and telemetry surfaces, but a general and clearly packaged configurable transaction-fee module should still be treated as in progress rather than fully complete.
Hub-chain / public-network direction: SUBSTANTIAL PROGRESS
This is the clearest area of forward movement. The repository now explicitly carries the Hyperledger Iroha 2 and Iroha 3 / SORA Nexus lines, the Nexus architecture is reflected in docs and config, and the public Taira testnet marks a transition from private architecture work into public validation.
Documentation and ecosystem contribution: IN PROGRESS
The docs portal, versioned documentation surface, operator runbooks, and overview material are materially stronger than a year ago. This remains ongoing work rather than a finished milestone.
Release stabilization of the 2.0 line: STRONG PROGRESS
In 2025 the project delivered a sustained v2.0.0 release-candidate cadence and kept the core codebase, SDKs, and docs moving forward.

Next Year's Goals¶

Hyperledger Iroha 2

Continue the path from the v2.0.0 release-candidate line toward a broadly consumable general-availability release with strong SDK and documentation parity.
Continue supporting the digital-currency and regulated-finance use cases where Iroha already has the strongest public adoption signals.

Hyperledger Iroha 3 / SORA Nexus

Use the Taira public testnet to harden consensus, routing, data availability, operator workflows, and SDK integration before mainnet rollout.
Main net rollout of Hyperledger Iroha 3 / SORA Nexus.
Continue refining the multilane, multidataspace, and governance-scoped execution model so the public-network architecture is operationally simple as well as technically ambitious.
Complete the remaining security-hardening, runtime validation, and end-to-end integration work needed for external-facing services and SDK flows.

Project-wide

Improve contributor and maintainer diversity beyond the current core team. Already work ot increase maintainer diversity is yielding results.
Increase the visibility and regularity of public community engagement.
Convert public interest around CBDC and regulated-finance pilots into deeper ecosystem adoption and repeat integrator activity.

Help Required¶

LF Decentralized Trust can help Hyperledger Iroha by:

Increasing visibility for the project within the broader LFDT ecosystem.
Helping connect the project with additional adopters in regulated-finance and digital-asset infrastructure use cases.
Helping attract more external contributors, reviewers, and future maintainers.