Private Blockchain Platforms You Should Know About — Xord

Blockchain platforms can be public or private, depending on the need of the user. This article will provide you with details about what a Private Blockchain is and the most used Private Blockchains in the market right now.

Enterprise Blockchain:

Enterprise or private Blockchains are invitation-only networks and a single organization governs them. Private Blockchain platforms let the network authority to place restrictions on the type and number of the members allowed on the network. This is to say, members with an identity can access a private network only. Every transaction made on the network is sent to and from a known member. Using a private Blockchain, any organization can hide certain data from some users and make it visible for others. This is the level of authority and security a Private Blockchain gives you! Law enforcement agencies and the military use Private Blockchains because of the reliability they offer.

Hyperledger Fabric:

Linux foundation hosts an open-source consortium, to facilitate cross-industry Blockchain technologies, named ‘Hyperledger’. Hyperledger gives software developers and industries a platform to work in diverse communities. This lets them build Blockchain platforms and frameworks together, that support business transactions. Hyperledger is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, IoT, supply chains and technology. Hyperledger does not have its own cryptocurrency or token. But it sure has possibilities to build non-monetary, highly scalable, industrial decentralized applications. Hyperledger aims to educate the public about Blockchain technology by building communities within its community. It incubates a variety of industrial-scale Blockchain technologies, including smart contract engines, libraries, applications, and decentralized frameworks. Hyperledger Fabric is one of those projects.

IBM founded Hyperledger Fabric. It is an enterprise-grade, permissioned, decentralized ledger platform in the Hyperledger consortium. Fabric, just like most other Blockchain platforms, uses smart contracts and helps its members send assets and perform their transactions. But unlike the permissionless platforms, Hyperledger Fabric members are required to enrol in the network through a trusted Membership Service Provider (MSP). Also, in order to get on the ledger, the transactions have to pass a transaction endorsement policy. Then once they are on the network, every peer rechecks the transactions in his validation step. Businesses want some of their member data to be private and others to be public, they want to maintain different sort of relationships on one network, rather than an open permissionless network. Hyperledger Fabric offers a modular, safe and scalable platform that supports confidential contracts.

Some use case examples of Hyperledger Fabric:

• Supply Chain applications
• Record keeping of Travel/Airlines agencies
• Finance applications

Technicalities:

Fabric is a secure, high performing, scalable Blockchain network. Go, JavaScript, or Java, SDKs in Node.js, Java, Go, REST and Python support Fabric. It uses ‘Chaincode’ as its smart contract. Chaincode is a software that defines assets and transactions. Hyeperledger Fabric uses Byzantine Fault Tolerance as it’s consensus algorithm.

Hyperledger Sawtooth:

Hyperledger Sawtooth was an Intel initiative and now the Sawtooth community takes care of it. It is a highly flexible and modular enterprise Blockchain platform that helps developers to build, deploy and run distributed digital ledgers. Hyperledger Sawtooth supports permissionless and permissioned infrastructure. Sawtooth has an architecture that makes sure the ledgers are distributed and smart contracts on the network are safe and specifically for enterprise use. Using this architecture, developers can create decentralized applications in various programming languages that can be operated and deployed on the system. Sawtooth works on Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) consensus algorithm that is run by a validator. PoET is a consensus algorithm that avoids high resources and energy consumption. This keeps the process more efficient. It has the Sawtooth Validator and a transaction processor for transactions. The validator of the process handles all the processes like validating the transactions and distributing the transaction to the peer nodes. Hyperledger Sawtooth performs parallel transaction execution that divides transactions into parallel flows, unlike the traditional serial execution.

Some use case examples of Hyperledger Sawtooth:

• Traceability of products
• Digital asset ownership

Technicalities:

Sawtooth supports multiple languages, such as Rust, Python, Go, or JavaScript. It works on PoET that chooses validator by targetting largely distributed validator populations with very little resource utilization. Sawtooth supports unpluggable consensus, which means you can switch to different consensus algorithms according to your needs. And while changing, it won’t start over with a new genesis block, or you won’t have to stop the validators. This is Dynamic Consensus. Hence, Sawtooth supports multiple consensus algorithms, Devmode, PBFT, PoET, and Raft.

Originally published at https://xord.one on November 16, 2019.