Bianjie In the Hyperledger Global Forum | IBC+iService in Enterprise Applications and the Interoperability of IRITA HUB
On June 8, Hyperledger Global Forum 2021 (HGF), the premier virtual enterprise blockchain event of 2021, officially kicked off with guests from Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Red Date Tech and many world-renowned enterprises and institutions.
Bianjie with our Japan partner Datachain jointly gave a presentation about “Fabric-IBC, Besu-IBC Combined with IRITA — — Bringing Interoperability on Enterprise Blockchains”.
Jeffrey Hu, Research Director of Bianjie and Ryo Sato, Senior Blockchain Solution Architect of Datachain together shared an introduction the IBC protocol and its design, the IBC implementation architecture in Hyperledger and YUI project, the interoperability of IRITA HUB based on IBC+iService framework and its implementation in enterprise applications, and also the planned NFT cross-chain transfers on IRITA HUB in future.
IBC: Cross-chain Communication between Heterogeneous Chains
Jeffrey illustrated, IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication), proposed by the Cosmos project, adopted a quite similar way of designing TCP/IP protocol, using a bottom-up approach.
IBC gave a quite abstraction for the decentralized ledger, and define the communication procedure between the ledgers. More particularly, this kind of communication can happen between heterogeneous blockchains (public chains and consortium chains)
These blockchains can connect with each other in an arbitrary topology. For example, the current network in the Cosmos ecosystem is not “hub-spoke” but like a matrix universe.
IRITA HUB: IBC + iService in Enterprise Applications
As mentioned above, the IBC protocol supports intercommunication among heterogeneous blockchains. Specifically, it can interconnect with consortium blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric and public chains such as Cosmos and IRISnet.
Jeffrey stated IRITA HUB by Bianjie and YUI by Datachain are two typical examples to demonstrate this ability.
IRITA developed by Bianjie is the 1st enterprise consortium blockchain product in the Cosmos ecosystem. IRITA HUB is the consortium interchain service Hub within the product family of the IRITA series, which has similar functionalities as IRIS Hub with additional enterprise supports. So it natively integrates the IBC module and also includes the iService function.
Talking about iService, Jeffrey illustrated iService can be considered as interchain service, which can play a more vital role combined with IBC regarding connection. To further explain, IBC is like TCP/IP protocol at the Transport Layer, while iService works like HTTP protocol at the Application Layer, together forming the TCP/IP + HTTP of the internet of blockchains.
IRITA Hub includes these 2 techniques and as a result, it can cross-chain connect with blockchains (Both public chains and consortium chains) that integrated with the IBC module, and also those without IBC via “Smart Relayer” that is customized based on Relayer by Bianjie.
IRITA Hub has served as an interchain service hub in the BSN environment where has already included many enterprise blockchain products and applications now.
In addition, Bianjie is also planning to support NFT cross-chain transfer on IRITA Hub in the future.
YUI: A Hyperledger Lab
YUI, developed by Datachain and contributed by Bianjie, is a Hyperledger Lab project designed to enable interoperability between multiple heterogeneous ledgers and support cross-chain application development.
Ryo from Datachain introduced the IBC protocol implementation architecture in Hyperledger Fabric and Hypderledger Besu, Fabric-IBC and Besu-IBC. For cross-chain communication, the design of YUI is based on the IBC protocol with extensions to support various Hyperledger projects.
And YUI provides modules and middleware for cross-chain communication as well as modules and tools for cross-chain application development, including an explorer to track status and events for cross-chain environments.
