Introduction to Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation in collaboration with various industry leaders in finance, banking, supply chain, manufacturing, and other domains to create standard blockchain technologies. We will now dive deeper into Hyperledger and some of the projects under the Hyperledger umbrella.

Overview of the project

Linux Foundation announced the Hyperledger project on February 9, 2016, with an initial 30 founding corporate members, including Accenture, IBM, DTCC, Intel, and R3, among others. At the time of writing, the Hyperledger governing board consists of 21 board members and around 200 corporate members around the globe. The project hosts a dozen code repositories of blockchain frameworks and tools. A few significant examples are mentioned in the following section.

Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework initially developed by the IBM and Digital Assets members. Fabric is a DLT that aims to provide a modular architecture for developers to use only what is needed. The framework supports the execution of logic abstracted into containers called chaincode. Using Fabric is easily enabled by the plethora of documentation, tutorials, and tools available for deploying business networks without much hassle.

Hyperledger Sawtooth

Hyperledger Sawtooth is a blockchain framework that offers enterprises a secure leadership election of nodes in the network, with special modes for executing instructions. Sawtooth offers a powerful, developer-friendly Software Development Kit (SDK) for a majority of languages to write and deploy smart contracts. Notably, Sawtooth is one of the early live projects to experiment with WebAssembly (WASM) as a virtual medium for the execution of smart contracts.

Other Hyperledger frameworks and tools

Some of the other notable projects incubated under the Hyperledger umbrella are as follows:

• Hyperledger Indy: A blockchain platform to specially handle decentralized identities from inside or external systems
• Hyperledger Grid: A WASM-based project for building supply chain solutions
• Hyperledger Quilt: A blockchain tool to connect blockchain realms of different protocols using the Interledger Protocol (ILP) specifications
• Hyperledger Caliper: A blockchain benchmarking tool to assess the performance of a specific blockchain with specific parameters such as Transactions Per Second (TPS), transaction latency, resource utilization, and so on

With this basic understanding of Hyperledger, let's now explore other blockchain platforms available to developers.