Hands-on with HyperLedger Fabric

“Blockchain is as significant now as the Internet was 25 years ago.” – Thomson Reuters

Well, we couldn’t quote anything more relevant and self-explanatory here. Blockchain is the new Internet, new personal computer, new rocketry, and all that amazed us with their enormous potential few decades ago.

Both  Blockchain and DLT are a little complex and detail-oriented tech phenomena that make people do some intense mental push-ups initially. Howbeit, once they start grasping the know-how of its unfailing mechanism, they tend to dig deeper and recognise it’s real-life applications. Perhaps, this is the reason why every modern industry today is amenable to the idea of learning and implementing Blockchain in their business model and reap the rewards of efficiency, transparency, and next-level security.

“Blockchain technology isn’t just a more efficient way to settle securities. It will fundamentally change market structures, and maybe even the architecture of the Internet itself.” – Abigail Johnson

Now, if you too are open to the idea of embracing decentralization, all that we’ll be talking next might prove lucrative for you. Here we are just on the cusp of introducing Hyperledger Fabric, an advanced open source framework favoured much to create permissioned Blockchain networks.

Team Systango has created an all-encompassing and insightful webinar to cast light on the powerful Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and everything else that you would need to know, including its architecture, setup, actors, data flow in Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger composer (framework developed over HLF), and a case study to render more clarity. Here’s a link to get started with our webinar- Hands-on with Hyperledger Fabric

For the busy souls, here’s a quick round up of our webinar-

What’s Hyperledger Fabric? Why it is Different?

Hyperledger Fabric is a Blockchain implementation platform geared to support the development of applications or solutions with a modular architecture. It is one of the eight and in fact, the most successful projects hosted by The Linux Foundation.

Now, there are multiple Blockchain platforms, but what makes HLF unique is the fact that it underpins a modular architecture to deliver high degrees of confidentiality, flexibility, resiliency, & ability to scale. It’s extensive and elastic architecture gives it an upper hand over all other Blockchain solutions competing in the market. Moreover, the biggest distinguishing factor is the fact that unlike the open permissionless system that allows unknown entities to participate in the network, Hyperledger Fabric enrolls users via a trusted Membership Service Provider (MSP) thus creating a closed ecosystem.

Then consensus, ledger storage, hosting and costing are more points that reflects the disparity between HLF and alternative Blockchains.

Basic Actors in a Hyperledger Fabric Setup

The five main defining actors of Fabric setup are listed as-

  • Peers : Most active elements operating in the HLF setup. These are nodes connected to clients (SDK) and responsible for hosting smart contracts.
  • Certificate Authority : Dispenses digitally signed certificates to different actors to verify ownership in the network. These certificates bind the actor and the actor’s public key.
  • Orderer : Orderer is responsible for ascertaining that all the peers in the network have committed a transaction. Whenever a transaction is proposed or committed by a peer, orderer is notified about the new transaction. Then it forwards and commits this block to all adjacent peers.
  • Channel : Wondering what defines channel? Well, members (organizations), anchors peers per member, the shared ledger, chaincode application(s) and the ordering service node(s) sums up the channel. Every transaction on the network is executed on a channel.
  • Chaincode : Written in Go or Java, Chaincode is a programmable code that is instantiated on a channel. It is the ‘smart contract’ that runs on the peers and creates transactions.

Data Flow in the Hyperledger Fabric

The most simplistic version of Data Flow in the HLF network is explained in the image below-

Here’s a typical data flow-

  • A transaction proposal is submitted by an application to an endorsing peer (Admin peer).
  • The Endorsement policies give a brief of how many and/or what combination of endorsers are required to sign a proposal. The endorser executes the chaincode (smart contract) to simulate the proposal in the network peer, creating a read/write set.
  • All endorsing peers send the signed proposal responses (endorsements) back to the application.
  • The application submits the transactions and signatures to the ordering service, which creates a batch, or block, of transactions and delivers them to committing peers.
  • Each time a committing peer receives a transaction batch, it validates that the endorsement policy was met for each transaction. It also checks in the read/write sets to detect any conflicting transactions.
  • When both checks pass, the block is committed to the ledger. With this, the state updates for each transaction and are reflected in the state database.

Architecture of Hyperledger Fabric

Image Source

The diagram shows the entire architecture and the hierarchy of components.

The Hyperledger Fabric consists of many nodes that communicate with each other. The blockchain runs programs known as Chaincode (central element, as transactions are operations which are invoked on the Chaincode), holds state and ledger data, and executes transactions. Each transaction has to be ‘endorsed’, and only endorsed transactions can be committed and have a impact on the state.

HyperLedger Composer

Hyperledger Composer is an open development framework build to make developing blockchain-based applications significantly easier. The composer comes with truckloads of built-in features that support you to develop your business network in an efficient way. Here’s the architecture of Hyperledger Composer-

Case Study- Blockchain in the Insurance world

The power of Blockchain can be rightly utilised to streamline buying an insurance and making an insurance claim. It will bring along several benefits, primary ones being-

  • Reducing the tedious paperwork
  • Developing a sophisticated system where some claims can be verified & handled in less time
  • Potentially checking fraudulent activities
  • Improving the data quality which is used during the underwriting
  • Enhance the efficiency across the insurance value chain, for instance creating processes for automated claims

You can explore how actors are identified in an insurance Blockchain setup in our webinar!

So, this is all that we drafted to give you a glimpse of our webinar. If you are keen to learn everything in detail, don’t forget to check our webinar Hands-on with Hyperledger Fabric.

If you need a development partner or preliminary consultation to start off your Blockchain project, do connect with our developers. Our specialised team of Blockchain development experts have built several successful projects and would be more than happy to create a robust solution for your business. You can connect with us here.

Happy Blockchaining from Studio Fintech!

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *