One of the main blockchain initiatives within the Linux Foundation-led Hyperledger project has passed a key development milestone.

In a recent tweet, IBM's Open Technology CTO Chris Ferris, who also serves as chair of the project's technical steering committee, said Hyperledger has released the v1.0.0 beta of its Fabric blockchain platform for testing.

The beta version comes nearly a month after the previous second alpha phase of the project was announced, and paves the way for a more mature and stable platform upon which business applications can be built.

According to the release notes, over 200 changes have been made in the log since the last release including "bug fixes, documentation and test coverage improvements, and UX improvements".

Other updates include the implementation of the 'keep-alive' feature for better resiliency. A new tool called 'configtxlator' has also been added to "enable users to translate the contents of a channel configuration transaction into a human readable form".

A Chinese technical blogger, named Zeng Yi and based in Beijing, has already detailed the deployment process and claimed a successful testing result using the new beta.

Launched in early 2016 with the backing of tech giants like IBM (which contributed a significant portion of the initial Fabric code) and banks such as JPMorgan, the Hyperledger project has since grown to include more than 100 corporate and startup members.

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