Hyperledger
What
is Hyperledger in
Blockchain?
·
The Hyperledger project was created in December
2015 by the San Francisco, California–based Linux Foundation.
· It started with 30 member firms, and has grown to more than 120
member companies today.
·
Hyperledger was set up with the aim of
accelerating industry-wide collaboration for developing high-performance
and reliable blockchain and distributed ledger-based technology framework
that could be used across the various industry sectors to enhance the efficiency,
performance, and transactions of the various business processes.
·
Hyperledger is a global collaboration that
includes leading businesses from the fields of finance, banking, Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain management, manufacturing and production, and technology.
·
They include big names like
Bosch, Daimler, IBM, Samsung, Microsoft, Hitachi, American Express,
JP Morgan, and Visa, in addition to a host of blockchain-based startups like Blockforce and ConsenSys.
Hyperledger's
Organizational Structure
·
Essentially, Hyperledger is not an organization, a cryptocurrency
network, or a blockchain system.
· It does not support
a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, but it works by providing the necessary infrastructure
and standards for developing various blockchain-based systems and
applications for industrial use.
·
Think of Hyperledger as a hub, where various individual blockchain-based projects and
tools that adhere to its defined design philosophy operate under its
umbrella.
·
Has two categories:
o Hyperledger DLT
(Distributed Ledger Technology) Framework
o Hyperledger Tools
· Hyperledger DLT Framework
o Hyperledger Fabric
o Hyperledger Burrow
o Hyperledger Sawtooth
o Hyperledger Iroha
· Hyperledger Tools
o Hyperledger Cello
o Hyperledger Explorer
o Hyperledger
Composer
o Hyperledger Quilt
· Hyperledger DLT Framework
o Hyperledger
Fabric is a platform for building various
blockchain-based products, solutions, and applications for business use.
o Hyperledger Burrow is a permissioned Ethereum smart contract blockchain node
that handles transactions and executes smart contract code on the Ethereum
Virtual Machine (EVM).
o Hyperledger Sawtooth is an enterprise-level, permissioned, modular blockchain
platform that uses an innovative Proof of Elapsed Time consensus algorithm.
o Hyperledger Iroha is designed to be simple and easy to incorporate into
infrastructural or IoT projects requiring distributed ledger technology.
o Hyperledger Iroha features a simple construction, modular,
domain-driven C++ design, emphasis on client application development and a new,
crash fault tolerant consensus algorithm, called YAC (Yet Another Consensus).
· Hyperledger Tools
o Hyperledger Cello allows blockchain to be used through an on-demand
“as-a-service” deployment model (Blockchain-as-a-Service).
o Hyperledger
Explorer is a dashboard utility that allows for
the monitoring, searching, and maintenance of blockchain developments and
related data.
o Hyperledger
Composer is a
set of collaboration tools for building blockchain business
networks that make it simple and fast for business owners and developers to
create smart contracts and blockchain applications to solve
business problems.
o Hyperledger
Quilt is a
Java implementation of the Interledger protocol,
enabling payments across any payment network — fiat or crypto.
·
Hyperledger Technology Layers
In terms
of the architecture, Hyperledger uses the following key business components:
·
The consensus layer takes care of creating an
agreement on the order and confirming the correctness of the set of
transactions that constitute a block.
·
The smart contract layer is responsible for
processing transaction requests and authorizing only valid transactions.
·
The communication layer takes care of peer-to-peer
message transport.
·
The identity management services is the necessary function for maintaining and validating
identities of users and systems and establishing trust on blockchain.
·
The API, or application programming
interface, enables external applications and clients to interface with the
blockchain.
· Hyperledger is an enterprise-grade, open-source distributed
ledger framework launched by the Linux Foundation in December 2015.
· Fabric is a highly-modular,
decentralized ledger technology (DLT) platform that was designed by IBM for
industrial enterprise use.
·
Traditional blockchain networks can’t support private transactions and confidential
contracts that are of utmost importance for businesses. Hyperledger
Fabric was designed in response to this as a modular, scalable
and secure foundation for offering industrial blockchain solutions.
· Hyperledger Fabric is the open-source engine for blockchain and
takes care of the most important features for evaluating and using blockchain
for business use cases.
· Within private industrial networks, the verifiable identity of a
participant is a primary requirement.
· Hyperledger Fabric supports memberships based on permission; all
network participants must have known identities. Many business sectors, such as
healthcare and finance, are bound by data protection regulations that mandate
maintaining data about the various participants and their respective access to
various data points. Fabric supports such permission-based membership.
· Because Hyperledger Fabric is private and requires permission to
access, businesses can segregate information (like prices), plus transactions
can be sped up because the number of nodes on the network is reduced.
Hyperledger
Fabric Functionalities
Hyperledger
Fabric comes with five main
features. They are as follows:
·
Identity Management: Identity management is crucial to any permissioned network. That’s why identity management is one of the crucial
features in the Hyperledger fabric. By giving the administrator to set proper
identity management, enterprises can make sure that they employ multiple layers
of permission.
·
Efficient processing: Hyperledger Fabric is efficient. This is because network roles
are assigned as node type. The efficiency is also provided by letting
transaction execution separately from commitment and ordering.
·
Modular Design: Hyperledger Fabric utilizes modular design, which means that it
is easy to integrate services or other systems into it. This also means that
you can specify the consensus algorithm, identity, and so on.
·
Privacy and confidentiality: Hyperledger Fabric also offers proper confidentiality and
privacy, which is very important for enterprises. They
offer proper data channels so that information doesn’t
leak, and confidentiality can be maintained at any cost.
·
Chaincode functionality: Hyperledger Fabric
offers chaincode functionality, which enables logic
to be invoked only when a specific type of transaction is called.
Modular
Architecture
·
The modular architecture of
Hyperledger Fabric separates the transaction processing workflow into three
different stages:
o smart contracts called chaincode that
comprise the distributed logic processing and agreement of the system,
o transaction ordering, and
o transaction validation and commitment. This segregation offers
multiple benefits:
§ A reduced number of trust levels and verification that keeps the
network and processing clutter-free
§ Improved network scalability
§ Better overall performance
·
Additionally, Hyperledger
Fabric’s support for plug-and-play of various components allows for easy reuse
of existing features and ready-made integration of various modules.
·
For instance, if a function
already exists that verifies the participant’s identity, an enterprise-level
network simply needs to plug and reuse this existing module instead of building
the same function from scratch.
·
The participants on the network
have three distinct roles:
o Endorser
o Committer
o Consenter
·
In a nutshell, the transaction
proposal is submitted to the endorser peer according to the predefined
endorsement policy about the number of endorsers required.
o After sufficient endorsements by the endorser(s), a batch or
block of transactions is delivered to the committer(s).
o Committers validate that the endorsement policy was followed and
that there are no conflicting transactions. Once both the checks are made, the
transactions are committed to the ledger.
·
Since only confirming
instructions—such as signatures and read/write set—are sent across the network,
the scalability and performance of the network is enhanced. Only endorsers and
committers have access to the transaction, and security is improved with a
fewer number of participants having access to key data points.
· Example of Hyperledger Fabric
o Suppose there's a manufacturer that
wants to ship chocolates to a specific retailer or market of retailers (i.e.,
all US retailers) at a specific price but does not want to reveal that price in
other markets (i.e., Chinese retailers).
o Since the movement of the product may involve other parties,
like customs, a shipping company, and a financing bank, the private price may
be revealed to all involved parties if a basic version of blockchain technology
is used to support this transaction.
o Hyperledger Fabric addresses this issue by keeping private
transactions private on the network; only participants who need to know are
aware of the necessary details. Data partitioning on the blockchain allows specific
data points to be accessible only to the parties who need to know.
· Criticism of Hyperledger Fabric
o The high-water mark of crypto-enthusiasm
broke in 2018 after the collapse of the price of bitcoin (which hit its peak on
December 17, 2017). Overoptimistic claims about the value of the new technology
were replaced with skepticism, and related
technologies, including Hyperledger, also suffered from this skepticism.
· Hyperledger Fabric's Competitors
o Hyperledger Fabric competes with other Hyperledger projects like
Iroha, Indy, and Sawtooth. It also competes with R3's Corda, which is also a
private, permission-based DLT.
o Blockchain service firm Chainstack
published a paper in January 2021 that shows development in Corda has been historically higher
than development in Fabric, though Fabric development passed Corda's in Q3 2019 when Fabric switched to GitHub.
o The Chainstack report shows that while
there are three times as many developers working on Fabric, Corda developers
made more than two times as many code contributions, and Fabric developers push
far less code per developer than Corda's developers.
Hyperledger
Fabric Is Not Blockchain and Is Not Efficient
·
Several critiques of Hyperledger
Fabric point out that a permission-based, private blockchain with Hyperledger
Fabric's features is not a blockchain, and current non-blockchain technologies
are far less expensive and deliver the same amount of security. Cointelegraph's Stuart Popejoy
put the case like this:
·
Fabric’s architecture is far more
complex than any blockchain platform while also being less secure against
tampering and attacks. You would think that a “private” blockchain would at least
offer scalability and performance, but Fabric fails here as well. Simply put,
pilots built on Fabric will face a complex and insecure deployment that won’t be able to scale with their businesses.
·
Hyperledger Fabric has also been
critiqued for lacking resiliency. A team of researchers from the Sorbonne in
Paris and CSIRO - Data61, Australia's national science agency, found that
significant network delays reduced the reliability of Fabric: "[B]y
delaying block propagation, we demonstrated that Hyperledger Fabric does not
provide sufficient consistency guarantees to be deployed in critical
environments."
Hyperledger
Fabric 2.0 Released in January 2020
·
In January of 2020, Hyperledger
Fabric 2.0 was released to address some of the existing criticisms. According
to Ron Miller at Techcrunch, "The biggest
updates involve forcing agreement among the parties before any new data can be
added to the ledger, known as decentralized governance of the smart
contracts."