This article is based on reporting originally published by Forbes (forbes.com) and on VMware’s own public announcements regarding Project Concord.
VMware as a Blockchain Infrastructure Provider
Blockchain technology attracted a wave of enterprise experimentation in the late 2010s, with organizations ranging from global retailers to financial networks exploring distributed ledger use cases. In that environment, VMware chose the role of infrastructure enabler rather than end-application builder — a strategy sometimes called the “picks and shovels” approach, after the gold-rush analogy of selling tools to miners rather than mining yourself.
Rather than rushing to market with a product, VMware began by conducting internal research. “We basically did a lot of research in the blockchain space,” said Pratima Rao Gluckman, VMware’s blockchain engineering lead. “We have a fantastic research team at VMware who basically went off and came up with a scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol. That is pretty much the foundation of our blockchain — it is our platform.”
Byzantine Fault Tolerance: The Technical Foundation
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is a property of distributed systems that allows them to reach consensus even when some nodes behave incorrectly or maliciously. It is a critical requirement for permissioned enterprise blockchain networks, where participants may be trusted but not unconditionally so, and where network partitions and node failures must not halt the system.
VMware’s research team developed a variant called SBFT (Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus). A research paper co-authored by members of VMware’s research team, published on arxiv.org, described SBFT as “a state of the art Byzantine fault tolerant permissioned blockchain system that addresses the challenges of scalability, decentralization and world-scale geo-replication.”
Project Concord: VMware’s Open-Source Distributed Trust Infrastructure
In August 2018, VMware open-sourced its SBFT implementation under the name Project Concord. According to VMware’s announcement at the time, Project Concord is “an open source distributed trust infrastructure” that “uses Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to deliver a functioning distributed trust system: one that is both ‘safe’ and ‘alive.'”
The two properties VMware highlighted — safety and liveness — are standard formal requirements in distributed systems design:
- Safety: The system never returns an incorrect result; all honest nodes agree on the same state.
- Liveness: The system continues to make progress and does not get stuck indefinitely, even under partial failure.
Gluckman emphasized that Project Concord is designed to run across heterogeneous infrastructure: “We also make sure that you can run these Concord nodes in a decentralized manner across many different cloud providers and on-premise data centers.” This multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model is particularly relevant for large enterprises that cannot commit all workloads to a single cloud vendor.
The VMware Blockchain Service for Enterprise Consortiums
Building on Project Concord, VMware developed a managed VMware Blockchain Service aimed at enterprise consortiums — groups of organizations that need to share a ledger without any single participant acting as the sole authority.
The core value proposition, as Gluckman described it, is “building enterprise-grade decentralized trust.” This addresses a common pain point in multi-party business networks: the reluctance of participants to place unconditional trust in infrastructure controlled by a competitor or partner. By distributing trust across multiple consensus nodes — none of which individually controls the outcome — VMware’s platform offers a middle ground between a centralized database and a fully public blockchain.
“The trust is distributed across these different consensus nodes,” Gluckman explained. The analogy to Bitcoin’s architecture is instructive: Bitcoin has no single point of failure that can be compromised to alter the ledger, because consensus is spread across thousands of independent nodes. VMware applies a similar principle in a permissioned, enterprise context — fewer nodes, known participants, but still no single controlling entity.
Three Strategic Pillars: Decentralized Trust, Day-2 Operations, and Developer Experience
Gluckman outlined three focus areas that define VMware’s blockchain product direction:
- Enterprise-grade decentralized trust — The primary mission, rooted in Project Concord’s SBFT protocol, emphasizing throughput, high-trust security, and scalability for large-scale deployments.
- Robust day-2 operations — Ongoing management concerns such as node upgrades, monitoring, fault recovery, and consortium governance after initial deployment. This is an often-overlooked challenge in enterprise blockchain projects.
- Developer-friendly tooling — Providing developers with the APIs, SDKs, and abstractions they need to build decentralized applications (commonly called DApps) on top of the platform without requiring deep expertise in the underlying consensus mechanisms.
“This is primarily our focus right now,” Gluckman summarized, “providing enterprise-grade decentralized trust, robust day-2 operations, and making it developer friendly so we can have as many decentralized applications that are going to be written on our blockchain.”
Notable Adoption: Facebook’s Libra and Enterprise Players
One high-profile example of VMware’s blockchain technology appearing in a broader industry initiative was Facebook’s Libra project (later rebranded Diem). According to Forbes reporting at the time, Libra incorporated a variant of HotStuff, a BFT consensus mechanism that VMware researchers helped develop. HotStuff later became influential across the broader blockchain consensus research community.
On the enterprise adoption side, major organizations including AT&T, Nestlé, and Mastercard were among the companies actively exploring blockchain applications during this period. VMware’s positioning as an infrastructure layer — rather than a competitor in any specific vertical application — allowed it to serve these enterprises without conflicting with their own product strategies.
VMware was not alone in this infrastructure role. Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Oracle all developed their own blockchain frameworks and managed services during the same period, reflecting broad industry conviction that the barrier to enterprise blockchain adoption was primarily operational complexity rather than conceptual interest.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers
- VMware’s blockchain platform is permissioned, not public — it is designed for known-participant consortiums, not open networks.
- The consensus layer (SBFT / Project Concord) is open source and deployable across multiple clouds and on-premise environments.
- Day-2 operations — upgrades, monitoring, and governance — are treated as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.
- The developer experience layer targets DApp builders who should not need to understand BFT internals to build on the platform.
- The HotStuff consensus algorithm that influenced Facebook’s Libra originated partly from VMware research, indicating the depth of VMware’s academic and engineering investment in this space.