What is Hyperledger Fabric and what you should know about it?

Blockchain technology is disrupting industries like never before. The technology has opened up a ton of opportunities for technologists to build solutions at the speed of light.

Today, at the center of building a solution on Blockchain technology, is Hyperledger.

Background

Hyperledger is an open source project by IBM. The company first built Hyperledger to use Blockchain for enterprise grade applications. When they decided to open source it, they partnered up with the foundation which is best at maintaining an open source project, Linux Foundation.

Today, both IBM and Linux Foundation are maintaining the project that will be used by millions in the coming years. And an interesting fact is that this is the fastest growing Linux Foundation Project ever.

Enforcing Trust

Blockchain’s success is based on the way it enables trust among two parties. The technology’s added value is what makes it one of the biggest and the most disruptive technologies ever. Any framework or platform that enables businesses to solve their trust problem, gains the most attention today. Hyperledger Fabric is the one that I believe will make this happen.

The problem with regular permissioned blockchain

Permissioned Blockchain is great for a lot of use-cases. But it just falls short when it comes to implementing it for sensitive information that is supposed to be staying between two businesses. The problem with permissioned blockchain is that all the transactions must be approved by all the peers, execute every transaction, maintain a ledger and also run the consensus. This is a pain when it comes to scaling up to a large extent. Though these are some of the issues, the biggest blow comes in since it can’t support private transactions & confidential contracts in a blockchain.

What is Hyperledger Fabric?

TLDR; Hyperledger Fabric is the enterprise-grade distributed ledger based on blockchain technology that uses Smart Contracts to enforce trust between parties.

A few months ago, Hyperledger Fabric was released to overcome all of the problems that permissioned blockchain has. Fabric now serves as the most secure foundation for blockchain.

How is Hyperledger Fabric solving the permissioned blockchain?

Hyperledger Fabric’s biggest difference is that it decouples the peers and organizes them into three important roles.

1. Endorser
2. Consenter
3. Committer

These three roles enables the peers in a blockchain to write to the ledger and still maintain it within two parties, not revealing everything. The consenters are the ones who verify that these two peers have exchanged some asset between them with an agreement that others don’t necessarily have to know.

How Hyperledger Fabric can disrupt industries

Any two parties on a public blockchain exchanging some sensitive deal/information will need Hyperledger Fabric. This technology enables you to manage confidential applications between two parties, without having to pass on everything to everyone.

We believe that Hyperledger Fabric is an important component of a blockchain stack and with Smart Contract coming in by default with Hyperledger Fabric, this only gets powerful from here.

Build Hyperledger based products