Introduction
Bitcoin and Ethereum fall into a class of blockchain that we would classify as public permissionless blockchain technology. Basically, these are public networks, open to anyone, where participants interact anonymously.
However, many enterprise use cases require performance characteristics that the permissionless blockchain technologies are unable to deliver. In addition, in many use cases, the identity of the participants is a hard requirement.
For enterprise use, we need to consider the following requirements:
- Participants must be identified/identifiable
- Networks need to be permissioned
- High transaction throughput performance
- Low latency of transaction confirmation
- Privacy and confidenttiality of transactions and data pertaining to business transactions
Hyperledger Fabric has been designed for enterprise use from the outset.
Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric is an open source enterprise-grade permissioned distributed ledger technology platform, designed for use in enterprise contexts, that delivers some key differentiating capabilities over other popular distributed ledger or blockchain platforms.
Keywords
- Permissioned: the participants are fully trusted.
- Pluggable consensus protocols: the platform can be more efficientively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models.
Smart Contracts
Fabric calls "chaincode", functions as a trusted distributed application that gains its security/trust from the blockchain and the underlying consensus among the peers. It is the business logic of a blockchain application.
- Many smart contracts run concurrently in the network,
- They may be deployed dynamically, and
- Application code should be treated as untrusted, potentially even malicious
Pluggable Consensus
The ordering of transactions is delegated to a modular component for consensus that is logically decoupled from the peers that execute transactions and maintain the ledger.
Performance and Scalability
Performance of a blockchain platform can be affected by many variables such as transaction size, block size, network size, as well as limits of the hardware, etc.
