Technical advantages of Hyperledger Fabric for blockchain networks

Blockchain is a solution and it has been transforming the operating models of multiple industries. Although blockchain has had its share of skepticism, the association of certain brands with blockchain engines can make them more trustable. One such blockchain engine is HyperLedger Fabric. HyperLedger Fabric is an open-source engine for business blockchains and has been backed by IBM and the Linux Foundation.

HyperLedger Fabric is a business blockchain framework with is open-source, production-ready and is one of the eight HyperLedger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. It is the creation of 159  engineers from 27 different organizations coming together to create a modular blockchain framework. HyperLedger Fabric supports distributed ledger solutions on permissioned networks for a huge spectrum of industries.

There are a few technical advantages that HyperLedger Fabric present which could make it one of the best framework for blockchain networks.

Permissioned Membership

HyperLedger Fabric ensures that all Participants have known identities. This permissioned network mandates that you consider compliance with data protection regulations. This data protection regulation requires that you know who are the members of the network who access a specific part of the data.

If we consider a private equity company, it is known that the equity is not publicly traded, and the investors are either venture capital firms or Angel investors. In these cases, the participants in the network need to have established their credibility and identity to participate in the blockchain.

Performance, Scalability, and Trust

The modularity of the HyperLedger Fabric separated the processing of transaction into three different status. Distributed logic processing and agreement, transaction ordering, and transaction validation and commitment. The reduction in the number of levels of person verification ensures that there is room for scalability and the performance is optimized. This splitting of the process, known as Chaincode execution, enables the dynamic growth of the network. 

For example in the capital market, when equity-backed securities are being transacted, the transaction volume increases because of the growing number of participants. This requires improved scalability and performance. The required scalability is executed by the splitting of the Chaincode execution.

It is important to understand the flow of a transaction in HyperLedger Fabric. 

• The transaction proposal is submitted by the application to an endorsing peer. 
• The endorsement policies give clear instructions on the number and the combination of endorses required to sign a proposal.
• The endorser execute the Chaincode which will simulate the proposal in the network peer, creating a read/write set
• The endorsing peers mandated by the Chaincode send back the signed proposal responses to the application
• The application submits the transactions and the associated signatures to the ordering service and it creates the batch or block of transactions to deliver to the committing peers
• The application validates if the endorsement policy enforced in the beginning is met when a  for every transaction that a committing peer receives in a batch of transactions  
• If all the cheques are passed, the block is committed to the ledger and the state of the ledger gets updated for each transaction, creating an unerasable and unmodifiable record.

It is to be noted that only the signatures and the read/write set are sent around the network. Additionally, only the endorsers and the committers can see the transaction. This simplified system works to enhance the scalability and performance, and at the same time, offering more security.

Data on Demand

One of the features of HyperLedger Fabric is the support for channels. This channel system allows the data to be seen only by the parties that have the need-to-know and have established their need through authority. This falls in line with the regulations and the need to protect the privacy of certain data elements of the participants. channels are essentially partitioning of data on the blockchain.

In the cases where financial institutions find the security offered by cryptography insufficient to protect the data, channels can come in handy to facilitate the data partitioning capability in protecting the privacy of sensitive data like the number of transactions that are being processed.

Rich Queries

It is quite known that the ledger in any blockchain is a sequence record of transaction information. While the transaction information might not be editable, it is surely accessible. In the vast chain of transactions across the ledger, it is important to have search functionality that will help isolate specific transactions.

Databases hold the key to querying, which will help retrieve specific bits of information. In version 1.0 of HyperLedger, LevelDB is an embedded database. LevelDB has a key-value database and it supports keyed queries, composite keyed queries, and key range queries.For instances that might need complex queries, CouchDB appends the rich query facility along with the basic query in the functionalities of LevelDB.

Modularity 

With the advent of many Technologies springs the from different corners of the globe, any technology that is designed to stay has to be accommodative towards other technologies. This is why the relevance of modularity comes in. HyperLedger Fabric facilitates the integration of third-party tools seamlessly to its ecosystem. One of the most frequently used integration requests is to “bring your own identity”.

Data protection

Data protection is considered to be of paramount importance in the interest of the investors and the sensitivity of private information. HyperLedger Fabric provides modified and unmodified PKCS11 for key generation. This support ensures that the elements that need extra protection in an endeavor of identity management stay away from the snooping eyes. For scenarios dealing with identity management, HSM  (Hardware Security Module) increases the protection of keys and sensitive data.

All these advantages and every fact that IBM & Linux Foundation have had a hand in the very existence of HyperLedger Fabric should be factors motivating enough to use HyperLedger Fabric for developing enterprise applications on the blockchain. Should there be a requirement for you develop your blockchain application on HyperLedger Fabric, the expertise and the industry knowledge of blockchain app factory can come in handy. Get in touch with our team to conceptualize, create and launch the perfect HyperLedger Fabric application that gives you the best of what the framework can offer!