Hyperledger Fabric: A Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains

TL;DR

Fabric is a flexible, modular permissioned blockchain platform supporting standard programming languages and customizable consensus, enabling scalable, high-throughput distributed applications without reliance on native cryptocurrencies.

Contribution

This paper introduces Fabric's novel architecture, supporting extensibility, industry-standard identity management, and a new approach to handling non-determinism and performance issues.

Findings

Achieves over 3500 transactions per second in certain configurations

Supports scalable deployment with over 100 peers

Operates with sub-second latency

Abstract

Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org). Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing blockchain platforms that require "smart-contracts" to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model using a portable notion of membership, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric introduces an entirely novel blockchain design and revamps the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks. This paper describes Fabric, its architecture, the rationale behind various design decisions, its most prominent implementation aspects, as well as its distributed application programming model. We further evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency. We show that Fabric achieves end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second in certain popular deployment configurations, with sub-second latency, scaling well to over 100 peers.