an asset tracking platform
Hyperledger is a foundation that supports a community of software developers and technology enthusiasts who are building industry standards for blockchain frameworks and platforms. Hyperledger’s work is crucial because they’re creating blockchain technology that fits the needs of businesses. Cryptocurrencies on public blockchains have regulatory implications and liabilities that prevent many companies from utilizing these networks. Hyperledger has many of the same benefits of public blockchain technology but operates without a cryptocurrency. With big supporters such as Intel and IBM, Hyperledger is the “trusted” deployment platform for enterprise teams.
Hyperledger and its unique project are growing every day. As of this writing, it has 190 member companies and several blockchain applications. Hyperledger’s first few projects include Fabric, Iroha, and Sawtooth. These are frameworks that developers can use to build private blockchains, create smart contracts, and build distributed identity for people and things.
This chapter shows you how to create an asset tracking and a smart auction application using Hyperledger’s Composer tool and introduces you to the Fabric, Iroha, and Sawtooth projects. You’ll gain a deep understanding of what the future of commercialized blockchain will hold for your company and industry. This knowledge can help you as you explore which technologies to utilize and which to avoid, saving you development time and resources.
Getting to Know Hyperledger
At the end of 2015, the Linux Foundation formed the Hyperledger project to develop an enterprise-grade and open-source distributed ledger framework. They hoped to focus the blockchain community on building robust, industry-specific applications, platforms, and hardware systems to support businesses.
The Linux Foundation saw that many different groups were building blockchain technology without a cohesive direction. The industry was duplicating effort, and the tribalism was leading teams to solve the same problem twice. The foundation members saw similarities between the birth of the Internet and the emergence of blockchain technology: If blockchain was going to realize its fullest potential, an open-source and collaborative development strategy was desperately needed.
The Hyperledger project is led by Executive Director Brian Behlendorf, who has decades of experience dating back to the original Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation, as well as being a chief technology officer (CTO) of the World Economic Forum. So, it’s not surprising that Hyperledger has been well received. Many of the top business and industry leaders have joined the project, including Accenture, Visa, Fujitsu Limited, IBM, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft. It has also attracted many of the top blockchain organizations.
Hyperledger’s technical steering committees ensure robustness and interoperability between these different technologies. The hope is that the cross-industry, open-source collaboration will advance blockchain technology and deliver billions of dollars in economic value by sharing the costs of research and development across many organizations.
Hyperledger is identifying and addressing the critical features and requirements missing from the blockchain technology ecosystem. It’s also fostering a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers and holding open space for developers to contribute to building better blockchain systems.
Hyperledger has a project life cycle similar to that of the Linux Foundation. A proposal is submitted, and then the accepted proposal is brought into incubation. When a project has reached a stable state, it graduates and is moved into an active state. Each of the projects were initially led by a large corporation or start-up, and since then, many of them have created strategic partnerships to share in the project’s development. For example, Fabric was led by IBM, Sawtooth by Intel, and Iroha by Soramitsu, but now many additional partnerships have helped advance each project.
www.github.com/hyperledger) and a chat service (https://chat.hyperledger.org) to connect with teams working on each of the projects. These are great places to get the latest updates and to check on the progress that these projects are making in development.
Identifying Key Hyperledger Projects
Hyperledger has several revolutionary projects either with Active or Incubation status. This section covers three prominent and well-developed projects. These blockchain technologies include distributed ledger frameworks, smart contract engines, client libraries, graphical interfaces, utility libraries, and sample applications.
Focusing on Fabric
Fabric was the first blockchain implementation on Hyperledger. It has become the foundation for developing most blockchain applications. Fabric is unique within the blockchain ecosystem because it allows developers to use pieces of Fabric without committing to all the functionality — a truly tailored plug-and-play experience. Fabric also can create smart contracts called chaincode.
Fabric is a permissioned blockchain and does not utilize a cryptocurrency. This means that all the participants are known (as opposed to on a typical public blockchain where all the participants are anonymous by default). Fabric works like most blockchains in that it keeps a ledger of digital events. These events are structured as transactions and shared among the different participants. The transactions are executed without a cryptocurrency. (In contrast, a public blockchain uses its native cryptocurrency to pay the network to operate and to allow all the participants to remain anonymous.) To dive deeper into the subject of Fabric, go to https://trustindigitallife.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/marko_vukolic.pdf.
All transactions are secured, private, and confidential. Fabric preserves its integrity by only allowing updates by consensus of the participants. When records have been inputted, they can never be altered.
Fabric is an enterprise solution interested in scalability and complying with regulations. All participants must register proof of identity to membership services to gain access to the system. Fabric issues transactions with derived certificates that are unlinkable to the owning participant, thereby offering anonymity on the network. Also, the content of each transaction is encrypted to ensure that only the intended participants can see the content.
Fabric has a modular architecture. You can add or take away components by implementing its protocol specification. Its container technology can handle most of the mainstream languages for smart contract development.
Investigating the Iroha project
Hyperledger’s Iroha project is built on the work completed in the Fabric project. It’s meant to complement Fabric, Sawtooth, and the other projects under Hyperledger. Hyperledger added the Iroha project because the other projects didn’t have any infrastructure projects written in C++. Not having a C++ project severely limited how many people could benefit from the work on Hyperledger and the number of developers who could contribute to the project.
Besides, most blockchain development at this point has been at the lowest infrastructure level, and there has been little to no development work on user interaction or mobile applications. Hyperledger believes that Iroha is necessary for the popularization of blockchain technology. This project fills the gap in the market by bringing in more developers and providing libraries for mobile user interface development.
Iroha’s iOS, Android, and JavaScript libraries provide supportive functions like digitally