Hyperledger Blockchain Ecosystem

This chapter mainly targets those who are relatively new to distributed ledger technology and permissioned blockchains. The primary goal is to explore Hyperledger blockchain concepts, to equip you with the necessary knowledge and important technical design methodology of the Hyperledger ecosystem, and then learn when to apply these technologies through real-world use cases. The materials included in this chapter will help you better understand later chapters, and will make it easier for you to complete the recipes included in this cookbook.

A good analogy would be the making of a delicious dish. A chef would first need to know what ingredients and seasonings they should use, then prepare them before they can actually start creating the recipe.

For those who already have a good understanding of how the Hyperledger ecosystem works, this chapter would...

An introduction to the Hyperledger family

The Linux Foundation has made significant accomplishments since its inception in 2000. In December 2015, The Linux Foundation announced the Hyperledger project as an open source environment for analyzing, building, and collaborating on the development of distributed ledger systems. The creation of the Hyperledger project has helped to attract many major participants including IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Red Hat, and Accenture.

Notably, Hyperledger focuses primarily on building distributed ledger solutions for permissioned blockchains and consortium networks. It is gaining popularity among large technology companies. Financial players have undoubtedly given blockchain technology substantial exposure as well.

At its core, Hyperledger is an umbrella project of modular open source frameworks and tools for building and experimenting with blockchains...

Building the Hyperledger framework layers

Before we deep dive into how the Hyperledger framework works, it would be a good idea to have a basic understanding of the Hyperledger philosophy.

The Hyperledger design philosophy at a glance

To address the diversity of requirements from different industries, all Hyperledger projects must follow the same design philosophy, which is as follows:

• Modular: The Hyperledger architecture working group defines functional modules to address common issues, including policy, consensus, cryptography, identity, and smart contracts. This modular approach allows different developer communities to work independently, while developing extensible frameworks using reusable common building blocks.
• Highly...

Solving business problems with Hyperledger

The majority of the real-world production implementations are Hyperledger Fabric with Hyperledger Sawtooth and Indy in the production stage. In this section, we will use three examples to demonstrate how we can solve real-world business problems with Hyperledger. We will look at examples for Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and Hyperledger Indy in the following use cases.

IBM and Walmart – blockchain for food safety with Hyperledger Fabric

Our use case is divided into different parts: the problem itself, the approach to the problem, and the end result using Hyperledger Fabric.

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