Launching the Oraclize service on Hyperledger Fabric
Blockchain, the underlying technology enabling Bitcoin, is gaining traction as multiple (yet potentially very different) implementations of such technology are being researched.
While most startups are building their applications on permissionless protocols, enterprises are investigating other kinds of blockchain platforms as well. One of these attempts trying to make blockchain more enterprise friendly is Hyperledger Fabric, a general purpose distributed ledger platform designed around the needs of enterprises.
Similarly to other blockchain protocols, a transaction on Hyperledger Fabric might depend on some external data (i.e. the current value of an asset) — that’s where oracles play a role. While this platform, differently from most of the others, does support natively the access to the Internet via HTTP calls, there are two main problems making its applicability limited:
- since every peer will need to do the same API call, there may be consensus problems among them — and every peer will need to have full access to that API endpoint. This is extensively described in the official documentation as well, under the section “Consensus considerations”
- it may not be possible to verify at a future time the transaction result by replaying it, as the API endpoint might have changed or it might not be available anymore
Both these limitations can be easily overcome by using the Oraclize service and its authenticity proofs.
Oraclize, leading oracle service for multiple blockchain platforms, is now launching on Hyperledger Fabric as well!
Given the blockchain-agnostic design of our system, the integration with different platforms is designed to be an easy process.
How to use the Oraclize service on Hyperledger Fabric?
The autonomous agents running on Hyperledger Fabric are not called smart-contracts but “Chaincodes”, the Oraclize API can be easily be called from within a Chaincode so that the external API call can be fully deterministic and its result transparently verifiable at any future time.
In the same way as on blockchain protocols, any Fabric Chaincode can require the data to be sent back along with an Authenticity Proof — a cryptographic guarantee proving the authenticity (no tampering) of data.
Beyond data-fetching
The Oraclize service works on Hyperledger Fabric in a similar way as on other blockchain protocols, being most of the system logic held within the (offchain, blockchain-agnostic) Oraclize engine.
As a consequence, the Oraclize service arrives on Hyperledger Fabric with its basic data-fetching (including Authenticity Proofs!) as well as more advanced tools, such as the Random Datasource and the Computation Datasource.
More information on how to leverage Oraclize on Hyperledger Fabric are available in our docs.
For support while developing, join our Gitter Channel dedicated to the Oraclize Fabric-API!
Note: The company has now rebranded into Provable.
