As part of our recent exciting partnership with Williams Martini Racing to explore and implement Blockchain technologies and contribute to their relentless pursuit of innovation for competitive success, we are beginning to get some important community questions and feedback. Many comments naturally center on network definition and governance, and, especially, consensus and peer operations. We strongly welcome and solicit all input as the only way to ensure everyone’s success. To help our community understand our approach and provide guidance and feedback, it’s important to understand the differences, especially in architecture and terminology, between Hyperledger and other B2B focused Blockchain technologies, and the general approaches to Blockchain as implemented for crypto-currency based Blockchains.
All Hyperledger Blockchains, including Fabric, must conform to a general abstract architecture. Principally, this means Communication Layer, Data Store Abstraction, Crypto Abstraction, Identity Services, Policy Services, APIs, and Interoperation. Consequently we can design in any Blockchain attributes and functionality appropriate to the use case. As Omnitude is a middleware layer to facilitate multiple technologies, use cases, industries, and blockchains, there are few single answers to those questions and we will utilize many options. We are quite interested in feedback from the community to help us insure we implement the best solutions for each industry and use case needs.
Hyperledger is permissioned and private. As it is an abstraction, permissions could be fully open and private could fully public. Private just means controlled entry into a network. A network could be quite small for some data points, like contract pricing, or very large, like identity or product location in a supply chain. We will have several public blockchains, including identity, but will also utilize fully private versions, potentially even for identity.
Hyperledger Fabric IS a blockchain in that transactions are stored in blocks chained together with the hash of the previous block simultaneously stored in the world state of multiple peers in the network. However, it abstracts and separates consensus. We are not currently implementing Proof of Work for consensus, as it is generally too expensive for large volume transaction processing. Some people argue that only certain consensus mechanisms are allowed (PoW, for example) to qualify as a Blockchain. Hyperledger and Omnitude take a more abstract view of consensus and support whatever mechanism appropriate for the use case. For private B2B networks PoW is simply too expensive.
Proof of ownership has several potential meanings. In the context of most Hyperledger application architectures, we generally mean proof of transaction ownership, but not necessarily asset or network (peers) ownership. So we would say yes to Proof of Ownership within that meaning. All transactions are signed by a recognized user and identity is vouchsafed by controlled issuers and permissions.
Hyperledger Fabric abstracts storage and provides 2 out of the box options. One is a bit more suited to high transaction volumes while the other is more flexible for complex data structures and queries, etc. Db gb size does not directly correlate with other more well-known dbs. Fabric provides configurable storage options, blocksize and max creation time, for example, which allow us to tune the db much like traditional rdbms’s. The primary option that we utilize is CouchDB. It is quite robust, provides multiple configuration options useful for supporting large data volumes, volatility, throughput, redundancy, failover, etc.
Omnitude maintains a presence in the Hyperledger Performance and Scaling Working Group and we expect to utilize the new Hyperledger Caliper testing framework to ensure performance for each use case.
Thanks for the questions and we’re always available to answer them and to accept feedback. We are all working together to discover the best ways to utilize and implement Blockchain technologies and need community input. This is a fast developing and evolving Blockchain world and we will be most successful with substantial community contribution. Keep it coming!
