Introduction
Blockchain is proving to be ubiquitous in a short period from its invention, with the first significant application being a cryptocurrency. Just like how we use HTML while browsing the internet today, blockchain is going to be the hidden layer in many applications, soon making users not even know that blockchain is implemented in the software we are using. Hyperledger technology is an open-source umbrella project of different blockchain platforms and related tools developed by the Linux Foundation to address enterprise-level issues with blockchain technology.
Since blockchain is the underlying technology of the Hyperledger project, it has been made open source so that anyone can contribute to the code, thus making the development faster to meet the enterprise-grade requirements. IBM, Intel, and SAP Ariba are other significant contributors to the Hyperledger project. There are different platforms available in Hyperledger Technology, prominent ones being Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and Hyperledger Indy. Let us have a look at these platforms in detail below:
🧬 Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric is the first project proposed to Linux’s Hyperledger project, where IBM has made a significant contribution. This platform is best suitable for healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and capital markets. The Fabric project can bring transparency and clarity to the real world. Tuna fish is a 40-billion-dollar market plagued with a lot of illegal activities right from the source to the consumer plate.
Using the Hyperledger Fabric project ‘Supply Chain of Tuna fish’, we can track each part of the process. While there will be many actors playing their role in the network, not every actor is know about the entire process. Only the fisher and say the owner of the restaurant, which uses the tuna, will be updated with the whole process as requires so that they can transact privately. Hyperledger Fabric V2.0 is the latest standard release in Jan 2020.
🧬 Hyperledger Sawtooth
Intel made most of the contributions to the Hyperledger Sawtooth project. The Sawtooth platform supports the dynamic change of the consensus algorithm, which is very helpful at the enterprise level. This enables the enterprises and consortia to make transactions, consensus algorithms that support their business needs.
Also, another unique characteristic of Sawtooth is that it supports both permissioned and permissionless blockchain networks. Like Fabric, Sawtooth is also used in the Supply chain. Sawtooth Marketplace is used for trading digital assets in specified amounts, whereas Sawtooth Private UTXO is used for digital asset creation and trading. Version 1.2 is the latest release of Sawtooth.
🧬 Hyperledger Indy
Hyperledger Indy is a unique platform that stores digital identities of different blockchains and distributed ledgers. The stored digital identities are interoperable across various domains and different blockchains. It indeed acts as a decentralized repository of identities, which drastically helps in reducing identity thefts if used across the globe.
To quickly deploy these platforms at the enterprise level, different tools are developed as well where Hyperledger composer is the one used to deploy Hyperledger Fabric, but it is almost dead now. Hyperledger Caliper, Cello, Explorer, Quilt are some other tools that are used.
Conclusion
Hyperledger, as an enterprise-grade platform for blockchain implementations in various industries, is encouraging the adaptation of blockchain widely. This being an opensource project, many people are contributing to the source code, which is, in turn, moderated by the governance board and approves the changes in a very efficient and transparent way. The Hyperledger umbrella has many projects in the pipeline, which will bring more efficiency in the business, thus saving millions in cost.
