What is a Hyperledger?
It is an open source collaborative effort to make an impact in cross-industry blockchain technologies. Hyperledger Project is backed up by Linux Foundation, and it gathers many companies from different areas of expertise.
List of some of the Project Members: Accenture, American Express, Baidu, Daimler, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, SAP, Deloitte, Oracle.
Hyperledger with its projects is trying to standardize key principles of a blockchain technology:
- Chain of Transactions – Ledger
- Distribution – Distributed Ledger
- Understanding and synchronization of nodes – Consensus Algorithm
History of Hyperledger
February 9, 2016 San Francisco, California, The Linux Foundation is announcing its new members from across the industry to create Hyperledger Project.
Two business blockchain frameworks were introduced: Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth.
In May 2016 former Apache Software Foundation co-founder Brian Behlendorf was appointed to the role of an Executive Director for a Hyperledger Project.
During 2016 and 2017, Hyperledher Technical Steering Commitee added seven more business blockchain codebases under it umbrella.
It brought together 30 Founding Memebers and code proposals to advance blockchain technology.
Hyperledger Goals
As stated on a its webpage, Hyperledger has 5 key goals in its core:
- Create open source, enterprise grade blockchain frameworks and code bases to provide best in support of business transactions;
- Provide, neutral, open and community-driven infrastructure, which is supported by technical and business governance;
- Build communities around the projects to develop blockchain PoCs;
- Educate people about the market opportunities that distributed ledger technology presents;
- Promote community of communities taking a toolkit approach with many platforms and frameworks.
Detailed description can be found here.
Projects & Tools under Hyperledger “Umbrella”
Before explaining tools and frameworks it is worth to mention possible states in project lifecycle for Hyperledger:
- Proposal
- Incubation
- Active
- First Major Release
- Deprecated
- End of Life
Frameworks (state as of June 2018)
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[two_third] Burrow – permissioned Ethereum smart-contract blockchain. Initially contributed by Monax and co-sponsored by Intel. Status: Incubation [/two_third]
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[two_third] Fabric – distributed ledger written in Golang. Intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture. It leverages container technology to host smart-contracts (called “chaincode”) that comprise the application logic of the system. Initially contributed by Digital Asset and IBM. Status: Active [/two_third]
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[two_third] Indy – distributed ledger purpose-built for decentralized identity. It provides tools, libraries, and reusable components for creating and using independent digital identities rooted on blockchains or other distributed ledgers so that they are inter-operable across administrative domains, applications, and any other “silo” Status: Incubation [/two_third]
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[two_third] Iroha – distributed ledger written in C++, based on Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm, called Sumeragi. Initially contributed by Soramitsu, Hitachi, NTT Data and Colu. Status: Active [/two_third]
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[two_third] Sawtooth – distributed ledger with Multi-Language support. Status: Active. Examples:
- Seafood Supply Chain case study
- Secure Bond Settlement Across Financial Institutions
- Digital Asset Exchange [/two_third] [/row]
Tools (state as of June 2018)
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[two_third] Caliper – Blockchain benchmark framework which allows users to measure the performance of a specific blockchain implementation with a set of predefined use cases. Hyperledger Caliper will produce reports containing a number of performance indicators, such as TPS (Transactions Per Second), transaction latency, resource utilization etc. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric, Sawtooth, Iroha. [/two_third]
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[two_third] Cello – Blockchain management/operation. It aims to bring the on-demand “as-a-service” deployment model to the blockchain ecosystem to reduce the effort required for creating, managing and terminating blockchains. It provides a multi-tenant chain service efficiently and automatically on top of various infrastructures, e.g., baremetal, virtual machine, and more container platforms. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric, Explorer, (Sawtooth, Iroha, Composer). [/two_third]
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Cello Analytics – Blockchain analytics. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Cello.
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[two_third] Composer – Development framework / tools for building Blockchain business networks. Composer offers business-centric abstractions as well as sample apps with easy to test devops processes to create robust blockchain solutions that drive alignment across business requirements with technical development. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric, (Sawtooth, Iroha). [/two_third]
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[two_third] Explorer – Blockchain Web UI. Designed to create a user-friendly Web application, Hyperledger Explorer can view, invoke, deploy or query blocks, transactions and associated data, network information (name, status, list of nodes), chain codes and transaction families, as well as any other relevant information stored in the ledger. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric, (Sawtooth, Iroha). [/two_third]
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[two_third] Quilt – an interoperability solution for blockchains, DLTs and other types of ledgers by implementing Interledger protocol (ILP), which is primarily a payments protocol and is designed to transfer value across distributed ledgers and non-distributed ledgers. The Interledger protocol provides atomic swaps between ledgers (even non-blockchain or distributed ledgers) and a single account namespace for accounts within each ledger. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): -. [/two_third]
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[row] Chaintool – chaincode packaging for Fabric. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric. [/row]
[row] SDK Py – Fabric SDK in Python. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric. [/row]
[row] SDK Go – Fabric SDK in Golang. Status: Incubation. Supports (Potentially): Fabric. [/row]
Useful links
Resources used for this article:
- Project Website
- A Greenhouse Incubator for Blockchain Projects
- Co-hosted series of articles about blockchain, published under DigiNA X-PLORERS medium
- Linux Foundation – Project Announcement
Thanks,
Krzysiek