Hyperledger Fabric
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What is Hyperledger
Before understanding about Hyperledger, we need to know what Hyperledger is not.
It is not a blockchain, it is not a company, and it is not a cryptocurrency as well. It is a project, containing different frameworks using which you can build blockchain.
Blockchain is a solid technology which is a base for bitcoin and many cryptocurrencies. It can also make revolution in market, so people thought of bringing this technology to b2c [business to consumer]. But what about b2b [ business to business], blockchain can also help in the enterprise market.
To achieve this, the project called Hyperledger was initiated by Linux Foundation Projects in 2015. There are so many technologies that are part of Linux foundation. because of them we are using wonderful technologies including Hyperledger. It has got members from different fields including finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing, and technology. All these companies came together and they are working on an open source project.
![What is Hyperledger]()
Hyperledger has multiple projects, we can divide them to two: frameworks and tools.
FRAMEWORKS
- Iroha
- Sawtooth
- Fabric
- Indy
- Burrow
The most famous in this, one from intel- Sawtooth and the other one Is fabric. Fabric is one of the most popular frameworks available for blockchain.
TOOLS
- Hyperledger composer
- Hyperledger cello
- Hyperledger quilt
- Hyperledger explorer
We use both tools and frameworks to build blockchain. Specifically, it is used to make permissionless blockchain or private blockchain but we can also use them for public blockchain.
What is Hyperledger Fabric in Blockchain
One of the initiatives within Hyperledger is Hyperledger Fabric. It utilizes contracts as a ledger and functions as a means for participants to manage their transaction just like other technologies. The fact that Hyperledger fabric is private and permission sets it apart from all of the blockchain platforms.
We know that bitcoin and Ethereum are public blockchain which means everything is visible to everyone. That’s one of the features of blockchain, it is transparent. Transparent in blockchain means the nodes in that network can see the data. But when this comes to enterprise market, they want to have their own solutions build on blockchain. But there are some issues with this. The first one was, they don’t want to spend a lot of money in the mining process and the second one was, they don’t want their data to be shared with everyone.
Let’s say we have two companies and they are competitors. Everyone will have new strategies and schemes and they don’t want to know each other’s strategies.
For example, we take a network which has some five nodes and they all share same ledger [L1]. L1 is the ledger that is shared by everyone. So, each and every node will be sharing data with L1. Since the above two companies does not want to share their data, we have an option of creating subnets. This feature is not available in Ethereum, so they wanted a new framework and they were also looking for a private blockchain and that’s where we caught this Hyperledger project in which you have got one framework called fabric.
So basically, fabric is private blockchain and it has this feature of getting subnets and we call them as channels. Since this is a private network, to be a member of the network we need to enroll through MSP [Membership Service Provider].
A node can be connected to multiple networks, so they will have multiple ledger [L1, L2]. Smart contracts are used to make changes in the nodes.