Peter Kent - Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies

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.

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.

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 signing transactions. It’s handy for commercial app development, and it adds new layers of security and business models that are only possible with blockchain technology.

Blockchains have systems that allow them to first agree on a single version of the truth and then record that agreed-upon truth in their ledger. An agreement system is called a consensus. A consensus is complicated, and grasping the nuances of how and why a consensus acts in the way it does is far more than a business professional needs to know. (If you’re curious, though, or interested in getting into cryptocurrency mining, check out Book 6.) What does matter for you are the consequences of different consensus mechanisms and how they affect what you’re doing on that particular blockchain. Iroha’s consensus, Sumeragi, is worthy of note because it’s very different from traditional blockchains.

Here are a few key things that make Sumeragi different:

Sumeragi does not have a cryptocurrency.

Nodes that start consensus are added into the system by the Fabric member services. Nodes build a reputation over time based on how they’ve interacted with the ledger. This is a permission blockchain run by known entities.

New entries are added to the ledger in a unique way. The first node that starts consensus, called the leader, broadcasts the entry to a group of other nodes; those nodes then validate. If they don’t validate, the first node will rebroadcast after a predetermined duration of time.

Depending on your use case for blockchain, Iroha may be positive or negative. If you’re worried about censorship, Iroha may not be right for you. In this case, you’ll be better off looking at a blockchain that is censorship resistant. If you’re worried about other players on the network committing arbitrage, Iroha may also not be right — further investigation is needed. If you want to know all the players in your blockchain, Iroha may be exactly what you’re looking for.

Skip this section if you aren’t part of the app development space.

Iroha is built for web and mobile app developers so they can access the strengths of the Hyperledger systems. The Iroha team saw that having a distributed ledger wasn’t useful if there were no applications utilizing it.

Iroha was developed for the following encapsulated C++ components:

Sumeragi consensus library

Ed25519 digital signature library

SHA-3 hashing library

Iroha transaction serialization library

P2P broadcast library

API server library

iOS library

Android library

JavaScript library

Blockchain explorer/data visualization suite

One of the major hurdles of the blockchain industry has been in making systems user-friendly. Iroha has created open-source software libraries for iOS, Android, and JavaScript and made common application programming interface (API) functions convenient to all.

Sawtooth by Intel is another distributed ledger project in Hyperledger. It’s focused on being a highly modular platform for building new distributed ledgers for companies.

Sawtooth does not operate with a cryptocurrency. It maintains the security of the platform by allowing businesses to create private blockchains. These businesses running private blockchains then share the burden of computational requirements with the network. In its documentation, Sawtooth states that this type of setup will ensure universal agreement on the state of the shared ledger.

Sawtooth has taken the basic model of blockchains and turned it on its head. Most blockchains have three elements:

A shared record of the current state of the blockchain

A way of inputting new data

A way of agreeing on that data

Sawtooth merges the first two into a signal process it calls a transaction family. This model is best in use cases where all the participating parties have a mutual benefit to having a correct record.

Intel has allowed its software to be flexible enough to accommodate custom transaction families that reflect the unique requirements of each business. It also built three templates for building digital assets.