IBM Hyper Ledger Fabric- Blockchain

June 1, 20160

Hyperledger Sawtooth is an enterprise blockchain platform for building distributed ledger applications and networks. The design philosophy targets keeping ledgers distributed and making smart contracts safe, particularly for enterprise use.

Sawtooth simplifies blockchain application development by separating the core system from the application domain. Application developers can specify the business rules appropriate for their application, using the language of their choice, without needing to know the underlying design of the core system.

Sawtooth is also highly modular. This modularity enables enterprises and consortia to make policy decisions that they are best equipped to make. Sawtooth’s core design allows applications to choose the transaction rules, permissioning, and consensus algorithms that support their unique business needs.

About Distributed Ledgers

A “distributed ledger” is another term for a blockchain. It distributes a database (a ledger) of transactions to all participants in a network (also called “peers” or “nodes”). There is no central administrator or centralised data storage. In essence, it is:

  • Distributed: The blockchain database is shared among potentially untrusted participants and is demonstrably identical on all nodes in the network. All participants have the same information.
  • Immutable: The blockchain database is an unalterable history of all transactions that uses block hashes to make it easy to detect and prevent attempts to alter the history.
  • Secure: All changes are performed by transactions that are signed by known identities.

These features work together, along with agreed-upon consensus mechanisms, to provide “adversarial trust” among all participants in a blockchain network.

Distinctive Features of Sawtooth

Separation between the application level and the core system

Sawtooth makes it easy to develop and deploy an application by providing a clear separation between the application level and the core system level. Sawtooth provides smart contract abstraction that allows application developers to write contract logic in a language of their choice.

An application can be a native business logic or a smart contract virtual machine. In fact, both types of applications can co-exist on the same blockchain. Sawtooth allows these design decisions to be made in the transaction-processing layer, which allows multiple types of applications to exist in the same instance of the blockchain network.

Each application defines the custom transaction processors for its unique requirements. Sawtooth provides several example transaction families to serve as models for low-level functions, such as maintaining chain-wide settings and storing on-chain permissions, and for specific applications such as performance analysis and storing block information.

Transaction processor SDKs are available in multiple languages to streamline creation of new contract languages, including Python, JavaScript, Go, C++, Java, and Rust. A provided REST API simplifies client development by adapting validator communication to standard HTTP/JSON.

Private networks with the Sawtooth permissioning features

Sawtooth is built to solve the challenges of permissioned (private) networks. Clusters of Sawtooth nodes can be easily deployed with separate permissioning. There is no centralized service that could potentially leak transaction patterns or other confidential information.

The blockchain stores the settings that specify the permissions, such as roles and identities, so that all participants in the network can access this information.