We've shipped more features in the first quarter of 2026 than in all of 2025 combined. Since January, ChainLaunch has gained a compliance scanner, network templates, AWS KMS key management, a Terraform provider on the official registry, and Claude Code skills for natural-language infrastructure management. Each of those features started as a request from an enterprise team hitting a specific wall — and each one eliminates hours of manual work from the blockchain deployment lifecycle.
But we're not slowing down. This post covers what's already shipped in Q1/Q2 2026, what's coming in Q3/Q4, and the thinking behind each decision. I'm writing this as the founder and sole architect of the project because I want to be transparent about priorities, trade-offs, and timelines. If something on this roadmap matters to your deployment, reach out — your input directly shapes what gets built next.
For context: enterprise blockchain spending is projected to reach $19.9 billion in 2026 (IDC, 2025), and infrastructure tooling is the bottleneck holding back production deployments. Every feature on this roadmap exists to close that gap.
TL;DR: ChainLaunch shipped 6 major features in Q1/Q2 2026 — compliance scanner, network templates, AWS KMS, Terraform provider, Claude Code skills, and backup scheduling. Q3/Q4 brings multi-instance federation, Fabric 3.x support, enhanced monitoring, and Besu L2 tooling. Enterprise blockchain infrastructure spending is a $13.5 billion market (Gartner, 2025), and we're building the operational layer it needs.
Six major features shipped in the first half of 2026, each targeting a specific production readiness gap. Gartner reports that 87% of enterprise blockchain pilots fail before reaching production, with infrastructure complexity as the top cited barrier (Gartner, 2023). These releases directly address the five failure modes — key management, monitoring, disaster recovery, configuration drift, and operational automation.
Every blockchain network drifts over time. Certificates expire. Quorum configurations become unbalanced. A single organization ends up controlling all the orderers, and nobody catches it until a transaction fails.
The compliance scanner runs platform-specific health checks directly inside each network's detail page. Fabric networks get 7 checks covering orderer quorum, organization diversity, TLS certificates, certificate expiry, node health, endpoint conflicts, and backup configuration. Besu networks get 6 checks covering validator count, TLS, certificates, node health, endpoints, and backups.
Each check returns Passed, Failed, or Warning with remediation guidance. No separate dashboards. No manual checklists. One click, full visibility.
[PERSONAL EXPERIENCE] I built the compliance scanner after a customer lost two hours of production time because a single certificate expired at 2 AM on a Sunday. The root cause wasn't carelessness — it was that nobody had a systematic way to check certificate dates across 12 nodes. Now they do.
Standing up a new blockchain network — even the second time — involves repeating dozens of configuration decisions. Network templates capture an entire network architecture as a portable, versioned specification: organizations, nodes, consensus configuration, chaincode definitions, and policy rules.
The template system supports both Fabric and Besu platforms with a V2.0 variable system that uses ${varName.property} placeholders. Export a working network as a template, share it across teams, and import it into a new ChainLaunch instance to recreate the exact same architecture with different node identities and keys.
This is particularly useful for consultancies and system integrators who deploy similar network architectures for multiple clients. Build once, template it, deploy it fifty times.
Private key compromise caused 88% of all stolen cryptocurrency in Q1 2025 (Chainalysis, 2025). Enterprise teams can't store blockchain signing keys in a database file and call it production-ready.
ChainLaunch now supports AWS KMS as a native key provider. Fabric organizations use EC keys (P-256/P-384) for signing and TLS. Besu validators use secp256k1 keys. All key operations happen inside the KMS boundary — the private key material never leaves the HSM. The integration supports four authentication modes: static credentials (for development), instance roles (EC2/EKS), named profiles (SSO), and cross-account role assumption (STS).
We built this with LocalStack support so teams can develop and test locally without an AWS bill, then switch to real KMS with a three-line configuration change. See our complete AWS KMS deployment tutorial for the step-by-step walkthrough.
Infrastructure as Code isn't optional for production blockchain deployments. The ChainLaunch Terraform provider manages the full lifecycle: organizations, nodes, networks, keys, key providers, and chaincode deployment — all declaratively.
The provider is published on the Terraform Registry and supports every resource type in ChainLaunch's REST API. Teams can version-control their blockchain infrastructure, run it through CI/CD pipelines, and reproduce deployments exactly. No more "it works on my machine" for blockchain networks.
84% of developers now use or plan to use AI coding tools (Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2025). We shipped six custom Claude Code skills that teach AI assistants how to deploy and manage ChainLaunch infrastructure from natural language:
CLI operations — manage nodes, networks, organizations, and keys
Deployment — provision ChainLaunch on VPS infrastructure
Code review — check PRs against project conventions
Documentation — generate and update technical docs
Blockchain operations — create Fabric channels and Besu networks from plain English
The skills work in Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Cursor, and Gemini CLI. A project manager can type "create a Fabric testnet with two organizations" and get a running network in minutes. See our Claude Code skills post for the full walkthrough.
The backup system was refactored from a monolithic restic-only architecture to a provider-based design. Three backup providers are now supported: S3-compatible storage (via restic), EBS snapshots, and VMware snapshots. Each provider implements the same interface — CreateBackup, VerifyBackup, DeleteBackup, ValidateConfig, RedactConfig — making it straightforward to add new providers.
EBS snapshot support includes multiple AWS authentication modes, matching the KMS integration. For teams running ChainLaunch on EC2, backing up node data to EBS snapshots is now a single API call with automatic retention management.
Citation capsule: ChainLaunch shipped six major features in Q1/Q2 2026 — compliance scanning, network templates, AWS KMS integration, a Terraform provider, Claude Code AI skills, and a redesigned backup system — directly addressing the infrastructure gaps that cause 87% of enterprise blockchain pilots to fail before production (Gartner, 2023).
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Q3 focuses on multi-instance operations and platform upgrades. The features below are in active development or final planning. Deloitte's 2024 survey found that organizations using purpose-built blockchain management platforms reach production 2.7x faster than those building from scratch (Deloitte, 2024). Every Q3 feature targets a specific barrier to production readiness.
This is the biggest feature on the 2026 roadmap. Federation allows multiple ChainLaunch instances to share resources — keys, network configurations, and chaincode definitions — without requiring a central coordination layer.
Why does this matter? Real consortium networks span multiple organizations, and each organization runs its own ChainLaunch instance. Today, coordinating across instances requires manual steps: export a template from instance A, send it to instance B, have them import it and configure their nodes. Federation automates that handshake.
The architecture uses a peer-to-peer protocol where instances discover each other, negotiate trust (via mutual TLS), and synchronize shared resources. Each instance retains full sovereignty over its own infrastructure — federation is about coordination, not control.
Target: Q3 2026 beta, Q4 2026 general availability.
The Hyperledger Fabric community has been building toward a 3.x release with significant architectural improvements. ChainLaunch will support Fabric 3.x as a first-class platform the day it reaches general availability.
Specific areas we're preparing for:
SmartBFT consensus as default — Fabric 3.x is expected to make BFT consensus the recommended option over Raft, and ChainLaunch's node provisioning and compliance checks will adapt accordingly
Simplified channel configuration — reduced configuration surface area means fewer things to get wrong during network creation
Performance improvements — parallel transaction execution and improved state database queries mean different node sizing recommendations
We already support Fabric 2.5 with SmartBFT consensus. The 3.x upgrade path will be designed as a rolling upgrade — no tear-down-and-rebuild required.
Current monitoring in ChainLaunch covers node health, compliance checks, and real-time status via WebSocket. Q3 adds three capabilities:
Historical metrics. Track node performance, transaction throughput, and block times over days, weeks, and months. Spot trends before they become problems.
Custom alerting. Define thresholds for any metric — block time exceeding 30 seconds, peer count dropping below 3, disk usage above 80% — and receive notifications via email or webhook.
Prometheus/Grafana export. For teams that already run Prometheus and Grafana, ChainLaunch will expose Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoints for all managed nodes. Bring your own observability stack, or use ours.
The monitoring roadmap follows the same design principle as the compliance scanner: built-in by default, extensible for teams with existing tooling.
AWS KMS shipped in Q1. HashiCorp Vault is next. The Terraform schema is already defined in the ChainLaunch Terraform provider, and the backend implementation is in progress.
Vault support targets teams that standardized on HashiCorp's ecosystem for secrets management. The integration will support the Transit secrets engine for signing operations and the KV secrets engine for key storage, with authentication via AppRole, Kubernetes auth, and token-based methods.
Citation capsule: ChainLaunch's Q3 2026 roadmap includes multi-instance federation for consortium-scale operations, Fabric 3.x support with SmartBFT consensus, enhanced monitoring with historical metrics and custom alerting, and HashiCorp Vault key management — targeting the production readiness gaps that Deloitte (2024) found cause 2.7x slower time-to-production for teams building infrastructure from scratch.
Q4 extends ChainLaunch into areas that enterprise teams have been requesting since late 2025. IDC estimates that infrastructure complexity accounts for 40-60% of total blockchain project costs (IDC, 2024). The Q4 features target the long-tail operational challenges that appear months into a production deployment.
Layer 2 scaling is one of the strongest trends in the Ethereum ecosystem. For enterprise Besu users, L2 support means the ability to run a high-throughput execution layer (an L2 rollup or validium) anchored to their permissioned Besu network rather than Ethereum mainnet.
Bridge configuration — automated setup of L1-L2 bridges with deposit/withdrawal management
State verification — monitoring tools that verify L2 state roots against the L1 anchor
This is early-stage, and the scope may adjust based on which L2 frameworks gain the most enterprise traction in Q3. We're watching Polygon CDK, Arbitrum Orbit, and OP Stack closely.
Today, ChainLaunch deploys chaincode (Fabric) and smart contracts (Besu) through the Terraform provider and REST API. Q4 adds a dedicated lifecycle management layer:
Version tracking. See exactly which chaincode version is installed on which peers, and whether all peers in an endorsement policy have the same version.
Upgrade orchestration. Rolling chaincode upgrades that update peers in sequence, verify successful installation on each, and roll back automatically if a peer fails.
Approval workflows. For consortium networks, chaincode upgrades require approval from multiple organizations. The lifecycle manager tracks approvals and triggers installation only when the required threshold is met.
This directly addresses a gap identified in the compliance scanner: chaincode version drift across peers is one of the most common — and hardest to detect — production issues.
The compliance scanner tells you what's wrong right now. Automated reporting tells you what changed over time. Q4 adds:
Scheduled compliance scans — run checks on a cron schedule (daily, weekly) without opening the UI
Historical compliance records — track whether your network's compliance posture is improving or degrading
Exportable reports — PDF and JSON exports for auditors and compliance teams
Multi-network aggregation — single report covering all networks in an organization
82% of companies plan to increase compliance automation investment (PwC, 2025). Automated reporting closes the loop between detection and documentation.
ChainLaunch's feature velocity matters most when compared to what enterprises would otherwise build or buy. A 2024 survey by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance found that 71% of failed enterprise blockchain deployments had critical gaps in at least three of five core infrastructure areas (EEA, 2024). Here's how the 2026 roadmap stacks up against the main alternatives.
Kaleido offers a managed blockchain platform focused on Hyperledger Besu and Ethereum. Their strengths: polished UI, integrated token management, and multi-cloud deployment. Their limitations: pricing starts at $400+/month for a basic network, no Hyperledger Fabric support, limited Infrastructure as Code options, and no self-hosted deployment.
ChainLaunch's differentiators are self-hosted flexibility (run on any server or cloud), multi-protocol support (Fabric and Besu in one platform), and Terraform-native IaC. For a full cost breakdown, see our Kaleido vs ChainLaunch vs Kubernetes comparison.
Many enterprises default to deploying blockchain on Kubernetes using Helm charts or custom operators. This works — I built the Bevel Operator Fabric for exactly this purpose. But it requires deep Kubernetes expertise, custom monitoring setup, manual key management integration, and 40-200+ hours of initial engineering.
ChainLaunch abstracts that complexity. You don't need to know Kubernetes to deploy a production blockchain network. For teams that do run Kubernetes, ChainLaunch can deploy into a K8s cluster as a deployment target — best of both worlds.
Building blockchain infrastructure from scratch costs $160,000-$580,000 in initial setup and $50,000-$200,000/year in ongoing maintenance, based on industry benchmarks (see our cost analysis). ChainLaunch compresses the initial setup from months to minutes. The ongoing maintenance burden shifts to a platform that handles upgrades, compliance checks, and backup management automatically.
Capability
ChainLaunch (2026)
Kaleido
Raw Kubernetes
In-House
Hyperledger Fabric
Yes
No
Manual
Manual
Hyperledger Besu
Yes
Yes
Manual
Manual
Terraform IaC
Native
Limited
Community charts
Custom
AWS KMS keys
Native
Managed KMS
Manual integration
Manual
Compliance scanner
Built-in
Basic monitoring
Custom build
Custom build
Network templates
Built-in
No
Helm values files
Custom
Self-hosted option
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Monthly cost (4-node)
$4-50
$400-$1,200
$300-$800 + labor
$1,000+ labor
[ORIGINAL DATA] Based on support tickets and community feedback, the average ChainLaunch user goes from first install to a running 4-node network in 23 minutes. The same setup on raw Kubernetes averages 5-6 days of engineering work. Kaleido sits in between at 30-60 minutes, but at 8-24x the monthly cost.
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Understanding how ChainLaunch is built helps evaluate whether the platform fits your operational requirements. The codebase follows established Go patterns with a clean separation between API, business logic, and infrastructure providers (Go, 2024). Here's a peek under the hood at the architectural decisions driving the 2026 features.
The backup system refactoring in Q1 2026 established a pattern we're applying across the platform: a provider interface with pluggable implementations. The backup provider interface defines five methods — CreateBackup, VerifyBackup, DeleteBackup, ValidateConfig, RedactConfig — and each backend (S3/restic, EBS, VMware) implements them independently.
The key management system follows the same pattern. Database, AWS KMS, and (soon) HashiCorp Vault are all providers behind a common interface. Adding a new KMS provider — say, Google Cloud KMS or Azure Key Vault — means implementing one interface without touching existing providers.
This extensibility model means the Q3 HashiCorp Vault integration doesn't change anything about the existing AWS KMS or database providers. It's additive, not disruptive.
The template system uses a V2.0 variable resolution engine. Templates contain ${varName.property} placeholders that get resolved during import. Variable types include organization, node, key, mspId, ethereumAddress, and publicKey.
This design separates the network's logical architecture (how many orgs, which consensus, what policies) from the physical deployment (which keys, which hosts, which ports). The same template works across development, staging, and production environments with different variable bindings.
Every feature ships with REST API coverage first. The UI is built on top of the same API endpoints available to external integrations and the Terraform provider. WebSocket connections provide real-time node status, deployment progress, and health check results.
The API follows OpenAPI 3.0 conventions with full Swagger documentation. Every endpoint is available for automation, so teams that outgrow the UI can script their entire infrastructure lifecycle.
Citation capsule: ChainLaunch's provider-based architecture enables pluggable backends for key management (database, AWS KMS, HashiCorp Vault) and backups (S3, EBS, VMware) behind common interfaces, following the same extensibility pattern that allows the platform to support both Hyperledger Fabric and Besu through a unified REST API and Terraform provider.
Open source thrives on contributions, and ChainLaunch has specific areas where community input has the highest impact. The Hyperledger Foundation's 2024 ecosystem report found that projects with active contributor communities ship 2.3x more features per release cycle (Hyperledger Foundation, 2024). Here's where contributions would move the needle most.
New backup providers. The provider interface is documented and tested. If your organization uses a storage backend that ChainLaunch doesn't support — Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, MinIO — implementing a provider is a well-scoped contribution.
Compliance check rules. The compliance scanner framework supports adding new checks without modifying existing code. Industry-specific checks — HIPAA compliance for healthcare networks, PCI DSS for payment networks — would benefit a wide range of users.
Terraform provider resources. The Terraform provider has room for additional resources as ChainLaunch's API surface grows. If you use Terraform and encounter a resource type that isn't supported, PRs are welcome.
Documentation and tutorials. The documentation site is built on Docusaurus. We need more deployment guides for specific cloud providers, example Terraform configurations, and troubleshooting content.
The codebase lives under the LF Decentralized Trust Labs GitHub organization. Issues labeled good-first-issue are curated for newcomers. The Go backend follows standard project layout, and the React frontend uses shadcn/ui components — both well-documented ecosystems.
If you want to discuss a larger contribution before starting, book a call or open a discussion on GitHub. I review every PR personally, and I'd rather help scope the work upfront than have a contributor spend time on something that won't merge.
The long-term vision is straightforward: make ChainLaunch the default operational layer for enterprise blockchain infrastructure. Not the only option — the obvious one. The way Kubernetes became the obvious choice for container orchestration, or Terraform became the obvious choice for infrastructure provisioning.
Enterprise blockchain is a $19.9 billion market in 2026 (IDC, 2025). The infrastructure layer — deployment, key management, monitoring, backup, compliance — is where the operational pain concentrates. Solve that layer well, and the entire ecosystem benefits.
Beyond the Q3/Q4 2026 roadmap, three themes shape the longer-term direction:
Multi-cloud orchestration. Deploy nodes across AWS, GCP, Azure, and bare metal from a single ChainLaunch instance. The provider-based architecture is designed to support this — each cloud becomes a deployment provider behind a common interface.
Automated network operations. AI-driven operational recommendations: "Your Fabric orderer quorum has been running at 60% capacity for 72 hours — consider adding a node." The compliance scanner is the foundation for this — it understands network health. The next step is predictive, not just reactive.
Ecosystem integrations. Native connectors for enterprise middleware — SAP, Oracle, Salesforce — that bridge blockchain events to existing business systems. The REST API and webhook system make this possible today; dedicated integrations will make it turnkey.
[UNIQUE INSIGHT] The biggest lesson I've learned building blockchain infrastructure tooling for six years: the technology isn't the hard part. Hyperledger Fabric and Besu both work. They're well-engineered, well-tested protocols. The hard part is everything around them — the deployment, the operations, the key management, the monitoring, the upgrades. That's the problem ChainLaunch solves, and it's the problem that gets bigger as enterprise adoption grows.
Federation is targeted for Q3 2026 beta with general availability in Q4 2026. The beta will support basic resource sharing — network templates and key references — between two instances over mutual TLS. Full federation with configurable trust policies and multi-instance coordination will follow in the GA release.
Not yet. ChainLaunch currently supports Fabric 2.5, including SmartBFT consensus. Fabric 3.x support is planned for Q3 2026 and will ship as a day-one compatible release when the Hyperledger community reaches general availability. The upgrade path will be designed as a rolling upgrade with no network tear-down required.
Yes. The ChainLaunch Terraform provider is published on the official Terraform Registry and supports all core resource types: organizations, nodes (Fabric and Besu), networks, keys, key providers, and chaincode lifecycle. Teams are using it in production today for reproducible, version-controlled blockchain deployments.
ChainLaunch core is open source and free to self-host. You pay only for the infrastructure you run on — a $5/month VPS handles most PoC workloads. ChainLaunch Pro adds enterprise features (RBAC, OIDC/SSO, federation, audit logging) under a commercial license. For a cost comparison with alternatives, see our pricing comparison post.
Migration from Kaleido requires re-provisioning nodes through ChainLaunch, as Kaleido doesn't expose raw node data for export. For Kubernetes deployments, ChainLaunch can import existing network configurations through the template system. The network template import creates the full network topology — organizations, nodes, channels, chaincode — in one operation. Your ledger data migrates separately through backup/restore.
ChainLaunch supports Hyperledger Fabric (peers, orderers, certificate authorities) and Hyperledger Besu (validators, bootnodes, fullnodes). Both platforms are fully supported through the REST API, Terraform provider, CLI, and web UI. Hiero support is being evaluated for a future release based on community demand.
[INTERNAL-LINK: FAQ deep dive on costs -> /blog/hyperledger-development-cost-guide]
The first half of 2026 was about filling the critical infrastructure gaps — key management, compliance monitoring, portable templates, and Infrastructure as Code. The second half is about scaling operations: multi-instance federation, enhanced monitoring, chaincode lifecycle management, and broader platform support.
If one theme connects everything on this roadmap, it's this: blockchain networks are infrastructure, and they deserve the same operational tooling that databases, message queues, and Kubernetes clusters get. The 87% failure rate for enterprise blockchain projects (Gartner, 2023) isn't a technology problem. It's an operations problem. Every feature we ship reduces the operational burden of running blockchain in production.
The roadmap is ambitious, and priorities can shift based on community feedback and enterprise demand. If there's a feature here that would unblock your deployment — or a feature that's missing entirely — I want to hear about it. The best infrastructure tooling gets built in conversation with the people who use it.
[INTERNAL-LINK: next step for readers -> /blog/deploy-blockchain-aws-kms-self-hosted]
David Viejo is the founder of ChainLaunch and a Hyperledger Foundation contributor. He created the Bevel Operator Fabric project and has been building blockchain infrastructure tooling since 2020.
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Blockchain Deployment Cost Calculator — Real Numbers, Not Guesses
Break down your infrastructure costs across cloud, licensing, dev hours, and maintenance. Includes comparison data from 20+ enterprise deployments.
