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Across Governments [state the intended audience as precisely as possible. For most white papers, this will be a technical audience, not a business audience. Does their level of technical understanding matter? Are there some matters they should already understand before they can get anything from the current document? Can we point them to this kind of prerequisite information? Does it matter which framework(s) they are using: Fabric, Indy, Sawtooth, etc? Does it matter what issue they are trying to understand: security, interoperability, etc?]
1.1 What is Hyperledger
Background
Blockchain is an emerging technology pattern that we believe can radically improve banking, supply-chain, and other transaction networks, creating new opportunities for innovation and growth while reducing the cost and risk of related business operations. With the rapid emergence of Bitcoin in the transactions domain since 2009, many businesses and industries have invested significant resources in investigating the underlying technology that powers the popular, yet controversial, cryptocurrency.
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that first gained traction in the financial industry because of its capacity to issue, trade, manage, and service assets efficiently and securely. The distributed ledger makes it easy to create cost-efficient business networks without requiring a central point of control, in marked contrast to the world of SoR (System of Records), where every member in the ecosystem needs to maintain its own ledger system and reconcile transaction updates with one another in inefficient, expensive, and often non-standardized inter-organizational operation flows.
As the shared ledger concept gains traction in the business world, blockchain smart contracts are also getting a lot of attention from industry. A smart contract is a collection of business rules which are deployed on a blockchain, and shared and validated collectively by a group of stakeholders. A smart contract can automate business processes in a trusted way by allowing all stakeholders to process and validate contractual rules as a group.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were designed to be completely open, decentralized, and permissionless: anyone can participate without establishing an identity; one only has to contribute by spending computation cycles. Under the Bitcoin model of blockchain, there is no central authority that controls admission; these networks have been called permissionless. Bitcoin is costly to operate because it requires innumerable proof-of-work computations.
Hyperledger takes a much more flexible approach to consensus than the traditional blockchain model. We expect most--but not necessarily all--of our use cases to require permissioned blockchains, something that cryptocurrencies do not directly support. However, we expect that even some of the use cases of permissioned blockchains will require different consensus algorithms. For instance, round-robin consensus may be sufficient for certain small, highly trusted blockchains, while other blockchains may require Paxos or PBFT variants. For this reason, Hyperledger includes support for modular, plug-and-play consensus. This modularity gives Hyperledger the potential to save computation cycles, scale efficiently, and respond to the multitude of enterprise use case requirements by providing a secure, robust model for identity, auditability, and privacy.
What is Hyperledger
Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and technology. Hyperledger, as part of the Linux Foundation, provides technology leaders a uniquely open and collaborative international community from which to develop, validate, and field enterprise-grade blockchain technology solutions.
What is Hyperledger
FIGURE 1: THE HYPERLEDGER GREENHOUSE STRUCTURE
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Table 1: Summary of Hyperledger Frameworks:
FRAMEWORK | BRIEF DESCRIPTION |
HYPERLEDGER FABRIC | A platform for building distributed ledger solutions with a modular architecture that delivers a high degree of confidentiality, flexibility, resiliency, and scalability. This enables solutions developed with HyperledgerFabric to be adapted for any industry. |
HYPERLEDGER SAWTOOTH | A modular platform for building, deploying, and running distributed ledgers. Sawtooth features a new type of consensus, proof of elapsed time (PoET) which consumes far fewer resources than proof of work (PoW) |
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1.2 Public Sector:
Public Sector
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