Oracle joined the Hyperledger consortium because of the consortium’s approach to blockchain using open source collaboration, modular architecture, horizontal/cross-industry technology support, and support for enterprise needs. Oracle looks forward to participating in Hyperledger for the benefit of our global customer base and the market at large.
The Hyperledger project is an open source initiative that aims to advance the use of Blockchain technology for the recording and verification of transactions. The technology is a shared, transparent, and decentralized system that is peer-to-peer in nature.
1. To address mission-critical enterprise needs such as scalability, security, robustness, integration, and performance to remove barriers to adoption and support blockchain applications in production.
2. To make it easy for customers to deploy, configure, manage and monitor blockchain and reduce the cost for deploying blockchain in enterprises by offering it as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) Cloud solution.
3. To accelerate the development and integration of blockchain applications with Oracle Cloud App Dev platform and built-in DevOps capabilities.
4. To help Oracle SaaS cloud customers enable their enterprise processes like Procurement, Payments, Trade Finance, Accounting, HR, CX to securely share data and conduct distributed transactions with 3rd party applications and external distributed ledger technologies using blockchain cloud platform.
Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration focused on business blockchain frameworks, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.
Architecture Overview
All Hyperledger projects follow a design philosophy that includes a modular extensible approach, interoperability, an emphasis on highly secure solutions, a token-agnostic approach with no native cryptocurrency, and the development of a rich and easy-to-use Application Programming Interface (API). The Hyperledger Architecture WG has distinguished the following business blockchain components:
• Consensus Layer
– Responsible for generating an agreement on the order and confirming the correctness of the set of transactions that constitute a block.
• Smart Contract Layer
– Responsible for processing transaction requests and determining if transactions are valid by executing business logic.
• Communication Layer
– Responsible for peer-to-peer message transport between the nodes that participate in a shared ledger instance.
• Data Store Abstraction
– Allows different data-stores to be used by other modules.
• Crypto Abstraction
– Allows different crypto algorithms or modules to be swapped out without affecting other modules.
• Identity Services
– Enables the establishment of a root of trust during setup of a blockchain instance, the enrollment and registration of identities or system entities during network operation, and the management of changes like drops, adds, and revocations. Also, provides authentication and authorization.
• Policy Services
– Responsible for policy management of various policies specified in the system, such as the endorsement policy, consensus policy, or group management policy. It interfaces and depends on other modules to enforce the various policies.
• APIs
– Enables clients and applications to interface to blockchains.
• Interoperation
– Supports the interoperation between different blockchain instances.
Hyperledger projects and explored multiple ways that consensus can be implemented within this modular framework.
Key takeaways include:
1. The overarching Hyperledger design philosophy for permissioned blockchain networks follows a modular approach that enables extensibility and flexibility.
2. Within this modular approach, Hyperledger defines common functional components and the interfaces between them, which allows any component to be modified independently without affecting the rest of the system.
3. The Architecture WG has been and will continue to define the following core components for permissioned blockchain networks: Consensus Layer, Smart Contract Layer, Communication Layer, Data Store Abstraction, Crypto Abstraction, Identity Services, Policy Services, APIs, and Interoperation.
4. The Architecture WG has shared a generalized reference architecture for consensus that can be used by any Hyperledger project.
5. Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, and Hyperledger Sawtooth each manifest the reference architecture principles in unique ways. The comparison of consensus algorithms commonly used with these frameworks is provided in Table 1, which can be used to quickly determine the strengths and weaknesses of algorithms including Kafka, RBFT, Sumeragi, and PoE
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