Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 released with various updates
Key highlights:
1. A new and updated version of Hyperledger Fabric has been announced.
2. Several improvements have been made in the new version to make it secure and user-friendly.
3. New features have been added as compared to version 1.0.
4. Upgrading to version 2.0.
Hyperledger has recently announced the release of Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, the updated version of its popular blockchain — Hyperledger Fabric. Some of the features that the new version offers include providing members with greater control over smart contracts and transaction approvals, better privacy, and multiple other performance improvements.
Since the launch, Hyperledger Fabric has matured to become one of the most popular enterprise blockchains. It has been adopted by major IT companies including IBM, Oracle, Alibaba, AWS, Google, and more. In 2019, 30 organizations on the Forbes Blockchain 50 list were using it. Due to its benefits and popularity, it has also become the first Hyperledger project to hit the 2.0 milestone.
What’s new with Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 features?
Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 has been developed, keeping in mind the user experience of the enterprises. The developers leveraged the user feedback and their experience to make the platform easy-to-use and more secure than before. The new Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 features provide support to the users and enable to meet the rising demands of the community.
Brian Behlendorf, the Executive Director at Hyperledger said that Fabric 2.0 a big milestone for the era of enterprise blockchain. He said in his statement, “Fabric 2.0 is a new generation framework developed by and for the enterprises that are building distributed ledger capabilities into the core of their businesses. This new release reflects both the development and deployment experience of the Fabric community and confirms the arrival of the production era for enterprise blockchain.”
Key enhancements and new features of Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 include:
Decentralized governance for smart contracts
The completely updated smart contract lifecycle management process introduces decentralized governance with a new process of installing a smart contract. The updated version provides greater flexibility to all the parties. Earlier, only one organization setting up the smart contract could define the parameters. It allows multiple organizations to agree on the parameters before the smart contract becomes active. Organizations can now add their own smart contract validations to better protect their interests before coming to an agreement.
Data privacy on a need-to-know basis
Earlier, the organizations had to create different channels to achieve data transparency. The updated version allows organizations to privately share data with other organizations, eliminating the need to create new channels. Separate hashes are created to track and audit private data transaction as needed.
New external smart contract launcher
The new smart contract launcher feature allows companies to build and deploy smart contracts with the technology they are currently using. It eliminates the need to deploy smart contracts using Docker daemon. Now, an organization may choose Kubernetes pod to deploy the smart contract.
Decentralized ordering service
Earlier, all orderers had to serve all the channels to submit transactions and create blocks. Fabric 2.0 allows for dedicated orderers for separate channels improving the network performance. It creates the possibility to support a large number of transactions and channels, and enhance privacy.
Introduction of Fabtoken
Fabtoken allows companies to create native cryptocurrencies similar to ERC20 standard on the Ethereum blockchain. Fabtoken offers the following functionalities to the developers using Hyperledger Fabric 2.0:
· Develop a new cryptocurrency or coin
· Transfer crypto between users
· Create a list of transactions
· Redeem cryptocurrencies or coins
You can read more about FabTokens here.
Performance improvements
Several steps have been taken to improve the performance over the previous versions, such as:
· Caching in peer when using CouchDB as the state database.
· Allowing validation for multiple transactions at the same time.
· Pagination for the smart contract queries to support large result sets.
Hyperledger has also published a blog sharing the updates in the new version.
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How to upgrade to Fabric version 2.0?
Generally, such a major release in any technology brings several upgrade consideration issues. However, rolling upgrades from v1.4 to v2.0 are supported. That means if you are already using Fabric v1.4 or higher, you can easily upgrade to the latest version without any downtime.
Upgrading to Fabric version 2.0 is a four-step process. The steps are the following-
- Backup the ledger and MSPs.
- Start upgrading the orderer binaries in a rolling fashion.
- Upgrade the peer binaries to the latest version in the same manner.
- Upgrade application channels and the orderer system channel, where available.
Check out the official documentation from Hyperledger here if you have any confusions in upgrading to the latest version.
Conclusion
The release of Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 is a significant milestone in the history of Hyperledger Family. It can boost the adoption of enterprise blockchains as it brings a whole lot of improvements over version 1.0. However, we still have to see how the latest version will perform and what opportunities will it bring to the users.
