A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Ordering Service for the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform

TL;DR

This paper presents a Byzantine fault-tolerant ordering service for Hyperledger Fabric, enabling high-throughput, low-latency blockchain transactions across wide-area networks, enhancing its reliability and scalability.

Contribution

The authors designed and implemented a BFT ordering service for Hyperledger Fabric using BFT-SMaRt, including optimizations for wide-area deployment, addressing a key limitation in version 1.0.

Findings

Achieves up to 10,000 transactions per second

Writes transactions irrevocably in half a second across continents

Demonstrates robustness with Byzantine fault tolerance

Abstract

Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine replication/consensus library, implementing also optimizations for wide-area deployment. Our results show that HLF with our ordering service can achieve up to ten thousand transactions per second and write a transaction irrevocably in the blockchain in half a second, even with peers spread in different continents.