Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise blockchain platform that can provide business benefits not available from other platforms. It is one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation and was initially contributed by IBM.
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise-grade permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. It is designed for use in enterprise contexts. Moreover, it delivers some key differentiating capabilities over other popular distributed ledger or blockchain platforms.
Significant Initial Backing
Hyperledger Fabric is a framework for building blockchain applications. It uses smart contracts stored on the ledger to automate business processes and enable trustless interaction among peers. The Linux Foundation, IBM, and Digital Asset Holdings founded it as part of their joint effort to build an open standard for Enterprise Blockchain solutions.
It was subsequently adopted as one of the projects hosted under The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger umbrella initiative. Hyperledger Fabric continues its evolution under active development by a growing community of contributors across the industry spectrum. That includes developers from leading financial institutions like Wells Fargo & Co., CME Group Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, and R3 CEV LLC, among many others.
All of them collaborate internally within their organizations and externally across the broader industry ecosystem. They do so through various working groups, such as those focused on privacy and access control management (PAM), identity management (IDM), or consensus algorithms (COALESCE).
One of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation
The Hyperledger project is a collaborative cross-industry effort to advance blockchain technology. Its primary focus is addressing essential features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers. It was initially launched under the “Open Ledger Project” name on December 8, 2015, after announcing itself in September.
Its modular architecture allows users to plug in their consensus algorithm. They can build applications using any consensus algorithm of choice—proof of work (PoW), proof of stake (PoS), or other techniques. In addition, it allows developers to create custom modules for things like transactions or privacy controls.
A pluggable implementation is one that another module can replace at runtime
It allows you to plug in the necessary consensus and membership services.
The modular architecture helps ensure interoperability between different projects within Hyperledger Fabric. Common standards like REST APIs, JSON messages, and other data formats like CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) are prevalent.
The modularity of Hyperledger Fabric also allows developers to make changes quickly if they want to experiment with new technologies or protocols.
Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play
Organizations can build blockchain solutions that meet their business needs without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. As a result, developers can focus on building their applications rather than the underlying blockchain infrastructure.
Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system.
You can think of Hyperledger Fabric as a container technology that hosts your smart contracts. These are the “chaincodes” that comprise the application logic of your system.
The architecture of Hyperledger Fabric supports various functions, such as identity management and data privacy, consensus algorithms, transaction ordering, etc. Therefore, it can support various use cases by changing these implementation modules without having to change the blockchain core itself.
Endorsement policies allow the creator of a transaction to determine which organizations must endorse a transaction for it to be valid
These endorsement policies can be used to control access to data or to control which transactions are considered valid.
For example, an endorsement policy with four validators has been set up. Four directors must endorse any transaction before it is accepted by Hyperledger Fabric as valid and added to its ledger (the distributed database). A director can only sign off on transactions that require their signatures.
If you try sending your transactions from the LedgerClient class, they will throw an exception because there is no way for them to get approved by you!
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise blockchain platform that can provide business benefits not available from other platforms
It is an open-source project, and it’s used for business applications. For example, the Hyperledger Fabric project uses a permissioned blockchain to give users control over their data while allowing them to choose who they share their data with.
It also has a modular architecture. So if you want to add functionality or customize it for your own needs, you can do so easily by plugging in existing modules or writing your code into the chaincode (smart contracts).
Conclusion
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise blockchain platform that can provide business benefits not available from other platforms.
It has a modular architecture providing support for pluggable implementations of various functions, including consensus and membership services.
It leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system.
There are many potential use cases for this technology stack. However, very few mainstream applications exist today.
