“Hyperledger is an open-sourced community of communities to benefit an ecosystem of Hyperledger based solution providers and users focused on blockchain-related use cases that will work across a variety of industrial sectors. “ – Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger.
Before I tell you what Hyperledger is, let me tell you what Hyperledger isn’t. Because with so many blockchain platforms around the IT industry today, it’s really easy to get confused. So, to begin with, Hyperledger is not:
- A
cryptocurrency
- A
blockchain
- A company
What is Hyperledger?
Hyperledger is an umbrella
project, under the Linux Foundation. NodeJs, Alljoyn, Dronecode are some
example projects that have adopted the “Linux Way”, i.e. to weave a community
of developers who work on open source projects thus maintaining a cycle where
a piece of code is constantly getting modified and redistributed.
The ethos of Hyperledger is that
the world will have multiple private chains running
separate markets. Since every business is unique in itself,
applications that tend to these businesses should be developed using
personalized rules. Unlike Ethereum which tends to force developers to build
their applications around generalized protocols.
Hyperledger project began with a
small number of developers in late 2015. These developers came from various
sectors like data science, manufacturing, banking, etc., and had one common
goal in mind, i.e. to make blockchain as a technology more accessible to
developers and industries. The project began with the testing of interactions
between applications and secure blockchain networks.
Why do we need Hyperledger?
During rigorous testing,
developers involved realized that blockchain networks, where every peer needs
to validate every transaction and run consensus at the same time, take a huge
blow in terms of scalability. Above that, transactions with a measure of
confidentiality and privacy attached to them cannot be executed on public
blockchains due to the exhaustive measures that are taken to ensure the
integrity of a transaction.
Suppose Bob, living in India,
wanted to buy chocolates from Alice in Switzerland. As they were old friends,
Alice decides to sell her chocolates to Bob at a pretty generous
discount. The catch here is that Alice sells her products to several different
markets and still needs them to buy from her at standard rates. Other than
that, to get the product from Alice to Bob a lot of third parties are required
to complete the transaction.
These third parties may have to
verify other aspects of the product like quality assurance, logistic
verification, payment verification, and much more. But they do not need to know
about the special deal between Bob and Alice. On a public blockchain network,
every ledger on the network will get updated about the deal as miners validate
and add transactions to the chain.
On a Hyperledger based network
though, it’s a completely different story! The peers directly affiliated with
the deal are connected, and only their ledgers get updated about the deal.
Third parties who help carry out the transaction only get to know the exact
amount of information they need with the help of permission and regulations
levied on the network.
Suppose Alice and Bob were
executing their special transaction on a Hyperledger based network, she would
look up Bob through an app which in return queries a membership service. After
the membership has been validated, the two peers are connected and results are
generated. In this two-party agreement, both results have to be the same for
them to get validated. But in other transactions with multiple parties, more
rules can be applied. These generated transactions are now sent to a consensus
cloud for ordering, following which they are committed to their respective
ledgers.
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and we will get back to you.
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