What is Hyperledger?

Overview

Many business enterprises want their transactions to be trustworthy; that is, they want to be sure they are paying for the right thing. Blockchain technology can help such organizations. The main idea behind this platform is to create and maintain an open-source distributed ledger framework and code-base that will help businesses to develop their applications that support blockchain. It further intends to provide enterprises with infrastructure, tools, guidelines, and standards to create a customized permission blockchainIt is a private blockchain that only allows validated nodes to join the network..

Architecture

There is no specific architecture as Hyperledger is meant to be customizable, but a general architecture consists of the following components:

• Consensus layer: It is responsible for ordering the transactions chronologically to form a block.

• Smart contract layer: It is responsible for holding the business logic and executing the transaction request from the client after checking its validity based on the provided business logic.

• Communication layer: It is responsible for peer-to-peer messages between the nodes participating in the shared ledger instance.

• Identity service helps add new identities/entities to the network. In addition, it is responsible for managing changes like drops, adds, and revocations.

• Policy service: It manages different policies like consensus, endorsement, and group management policies. It relies on other modules to enforce these policies.

• API: It provides an interface for the applications to connect to and perform transactions on the blockchain network.

Projects

The following are some of the ongoing projects under the umbrella of Hyperledger:

1. Fabric

2. Burrow

3. Indy

4. Iroha

5. Sawtooth

Details about Hyperledger can be found on the charter published on their official website.