Hyperledger Fabric: a Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains

April 8, 2019

Marko Vukolić


Hyperledger Fabric: a Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains

Time:   10:45am
Location:   Meeting room 302 (Mountain View), level 3

Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org). Fabric supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing blockchain platforms that require “smart-contracts” to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model using a portable notion of membership, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric introduces an entirely novel blockchain design and revamps the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks. Although not yet performance-optimized, Fabric achieves, in certain popular deployment configurations, end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second (of a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency), with sub-second latency, scaling well to over 100 peers. In this talk we discuss Hyperledger Fabric architecture, detailing the rationale behind various design decisions. We also briefly discuss distributed ledger technology (DLT) use cases to which Hyperledger Fabric is relevant, including financial industry, manufacturing industry, supply chain management, government use cases and many more.