What is Hyperledger Fabric?

The Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise-focused modular blockchain architecture that lays the groundwork for private-sector blockchain products, solutions, and application development utilizing plug-and-play components.

The Linux Foundation is now hosting Hyperledger Fabric, a cross-industry collaborative effort that Digital Asset and IBM started. Fabric broke out of the Hyperledger “greenhouse” and into the wild in July 2017, the first of many releases.

The Insides of Hyperledger Fabric

Private transactions and secret contracts are crucial for companies, but traditional blockchain networks can’t handle them. In light of this need, Hyperledger Fabric was born as a secure, scalable, and adaptable platform for industrial blockchain solutions.

The open-source blockchain engine, Hyperledger Fabric, handles the most crucial aspects of assessing and implementing blockchain for enterprise use cases.

A participant’s verified identification is an essential criterion inside private industrial networks. Hyperledger Fabric allows for permission-based memberships; all nodes in the network must have public IDs. Data protection requirements bind several industries, including healthcare and banking, which must keep track of participants and their access to different data points. For this kind of permission-based membership, Fabric is a good fit.

Building from the Ground Up

Hyperledger Fabric’s modular design divides the transaction processing workflow into three modules: chaincode, which are smart contracts that make up the system’s distributed logic processing and agreement; transaction sequencing; and validation and commitment. There are several advantages to this separation:

• A simplified verification and trust system that keeps processing and the network uncluttered
• Enhanced capacity to scale the network
• Increased efficiency

Hyperledger Fabric also facilitates the reuse of existing functionality and the ready-made integration of different modules with its support for plug-and-play components. If an existing function exists for participant identity verification, an enterprise-level network may easily include and use this module rather than developing a new one from the ground up.

Each member of the network is responsible for one of three things:

• Personal recommendation
• Devoted individual
• Give your consent

The endorsement policy specifies the number of endorsers required before sending the transaction proposal to the endorser peer. The committer(s) gets a batch or block of transactions once the endorser(s) have provided enough endorsements. Verifying compliance with the endorsement policy and the absence of conflicting transactions is the responsibility of the committers. You can commit the transactions to the ledger once you’ve done both checks.

Improved network efficiency and scalability result from sending just confirming instructions, such as signatures and read/write sets. The transaction is only accessible to endorsers and committers, improving security because fewer people access critical data points.

Using Hyperledger Fabric as an Example

Assume for a moment that a chocolate maker would want to keep the pricing of their wares a secret in some areas (say, Chinese merchants) but divulge it to others (say, all US retailers) for a specific price.

Using a simplified form of blockchain technology to facilitate this transaction might expose the secret pricing to all parties involved, as the product’s transportation might involve customs, a shipping business, and a finance bank, among others.

One solution to this problem is Hyperledger Fabric, which ensures that only those parties with a legitimate need to know about a transaction may access it on the network. Blockchain data partitioning ensures that only those with a legitimate need to know can access specific data points.

A Critical Review of Hyperledger Fabric

Following bitcoin’s price decline in 2018 (it peaked on December 17, 2017), the previous high point of crypto-enthusiasm collapsed as well. Skepticism supplanted overly enthusiastic assertions of the new technology’s worth, and this skepticism extended to associated technologies like Hyperledger.

Ones That Compete with Hyperledger Fabric

Iroha, Indy, and Sawtooth are some of the other Hyperledger projects that Hyperledger Fabric faces competition from. It goes head-to-head with Corda, R3’s private, permission-based DLT.

The January 2020 study by blockchain service provider Chainstack demonstrates that Corda has always had more development than Fabric but that Fabric overtook Corda in development in Q3 2019 once Fabric moved to GitHub.

Despite having three times as many developers working on Fabric, the analysis from Chainstack reveals that developers on Corda contributed almost twice as much code. In contrast, developers on Fabric submit much less code per developer than on Corda.

Hyperledger Fabric Isn’t an Efficient Blockchain Alternative

Many Hyperledger Fabric detractors have brought up the point that a permission-based private blockchain that incorporates Hyperledger Fabric’s functionality is not really a blockchain and that there are already very affordable alternatives that provide equivalent security. This is how Stuart Popejoy of Cointelegraph presented the argument:

Fabric is less resistant to manipulation and assault and has a more intricate design than any blockchain network. You may expect scalability and performance from a “private” blockchain, but Fabric also falls short in those areas. Put, pilots based on Fabric will encounter a complicated and insecure deployment, making it impossible for their enterprises to expand.

Some have also said that Hyperledger Fabric isn’t resilient enough. Significant network delays diminished Fabric’s trustworthiness, according to a team of researchers from the Sorbonne in Paris and CSIRO-Data61, Australia’s national science agency: “By delaying block propagation, we demonstrated that Hyperledger Fabric does not provide sufficient consistency guarantees to be deployed in critical environments.”

In 2020, Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 will be available.

Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, which aimed to fix some of the previous issues, came out in January 2020. Techcrunch reporter Ron Miller states that “the biggest updates involve forcing agreement among the parties before any new data can be added to the ledger, known as decentralized governance of the smart contracts.”

The upgrade doesn’t drastically alter Fabric’s use or simplicity, but it does show that the cryptocurrency industry is moving forward even after the crypto-mania of 2018. Many believe that corporate blockchain will finally find its niche in the market during the next 5–10 years.

Conclusion

• The Linux Foundation released Hyperledger in December 2016 as an open-source distributed ledger system suitable for corporate use.
• Fabric is IBM’s decentralized ledger technology (DLT) platform for industrial enterprises; it is very customizable.
• Businesses may separate sensitive data (such as pricing) on Hyperledger Fabric, which is private and requires authorization to access. Additionally, the network can process transactions faster with fewer nodes.
• January 2020 saw the introduction of Fabric 2.0. This version’s key features include improved data sharing, quicker transactions, and updated intelligent contract technology.