Super Hero: Hyperledger Fabric

Once in a while, some brave souls work on a major breakthrough technology. Currently, few of those brave souls are working on a blockchain framework implementation called Hyperlegder Fabric. Production ready version has already been developed and more work is being done. A solid number of 159 developers contributed to its genesis.

Hyperledger Fabric was developed with the intention of providing a platform to the developers to develop solutions keeping in mind the modular architecture. The brain behind the Hyperledger Fabric is The Linux Foundation who worked on other Hyperledger Projects as well.  However, initial contributors were Digital Asset and IBM, during the first hackathon related private blockchain.

Let’s move ahead and see what Hyperledger Fabric consists of.

The whole world was pretty much busy with public blockchain implementation of Cryptocurrencies. However, it was the need of the hour that doors are opened for the developers to explore the various domains where private blockchain can do wonders. Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 was the last version released (at the time of writing this blog). This version is a production ready product. This version marks the significant milestone in the expansion of the Distributed Ledger Technology solutions.

Technology is based on the standard concept of Blockchain- A shared and replicated ledger. All the participants that want to participate in the network, will have to be authenticated by the Network. For Authentication purpose, Certificate Authority can be used. Network components include Peers, CAs, Orderer etc. Orderer is one of the most imp components. The network must have at least one orderer as this is the component which intercepts all the requests/transactions before forwarding them to CA for authentication and later on if authenticated successfully, will move it to Peers for finally committing the transaction over the ledger.  Access control can also be defined for users in the network, i.e., based on the access control settings, we can allow some users to just the read the ledger data and not update or modify it. Instead of using the Proof of Work and Proof of stake as consensus algo, Fabric can make use of a varying category of consensus algorithm (eg: Byzantine or Crash Fault Tolerant ). Every operation happens over the channel created between the participating entities which can only be connected once all of them are authenticated by the system, making the network perfectly PRIVATE. For that reason, this is considered as a Private Blockchain.

Few of the key features are as given below:

Because of modular architecture, components can be introduced separately. For ex: Membership  Service Provider, Consensus Provider etc
Ability to provide custom endorsement policies for transactions
Makes use of CouchDB that simplifies the usage of wide range of queries.
For any transaction to take place, be it configuration related or related to actually adding/updating data on the ledger, channel is used, which are secure.

Basically, there are 3 abstract use cases for Hyperledger Fabric:

• Business Contracts
• Asset Depository
• Supply Chain

Some example Use cases of Hyperledger Fabric Private Blockchain Network:

• Electronic Voting System
• Music Records Publishing
• Credit Cards
• Citizen ID Tracking
• Property Ownership
• Charity
• Electronic Health Record
• IoT
• Medical Insurance

Now the basics are covered. We will move to an installation of the Hyperledger Fabric Network. It’s covered in a separate blog by one of my colleague, Neeraj Kumar and the link for this is given below:

Hyperledger-Fabric-Setup-With-All-Prerequisite

Happy Coding!