Hyperledger supports Smart Contracts written in Solidity
What are Hyperledger and Hyperledger Fabric?
Hyperledger Fabric is mainly aimed towards private enterprises providing them with a modular blockchain framework that provides a strong footing to integrate blockchain-based products, solutions and applications using plug and play components. The Hyperledger is an open-source ledger developed by the Linux Foundation in 2015. The Hyperledger Fabric is not available to the normal public and requires permission to access the framework. It can be accessed by businesses to integrate blockchain-related services into their own business. Some examples being, segregating information (prices of products), transactions can be sped up because the number of nodes on the network is very less as compared to the regular blockchain. Hyperledger Fabric was initially started by IBM and Digital Asset and now is being hosted by the Linux Foundation. Among the many Hyperledger projects, Fabric was the first one to exit the 'incubation' stage and reach the 'active' stage in 2017.
How does Hyperledger Fabric work?
Blockchains are customarily built to develop a kind of transparency around how the transactions of the world we live in right now take place. A blockchain makes all the data that is flowing through it and is stored in it transparent to everyone. It records data in such a way that it makes it very difficult to cheat the system. It makes all the data available to everyone so whoever wants to, can access the data at any time. This means that all the transactions happening on the blockchain are transparent and anyone can see who is sending money to who.
Private contracts and transactions are of the highest importance to businesses. Hyperledger Fabric was designed to solve this problem. It is a secure foundation for offering industrial solutions by implementing the blockchain. Hyperledger Fabric is an open-source engine for the blockchain that uses the blockchain for use cases which will be useful to businesses, helping blockchain technology reach a new level of adoption in the real world. Within private industrial networks, verifying the identity of the people who you are selling to or buying from is very important. Hyperledger Fabric lets the people buy memberships based on permissions from the businesses, which means that everyone who is participating in the network has to verify their identity which completes the primary requirement of many businesses, i.e participants must have known identities. Many business sectors like finance, healthcare, etc. are bounded by data protection regulations that regulate how the data that is being maintained by the various participants is being used. Fabric solves this by allowing permission-based memberships. It also helps in speeding up transactions.
Hyperledger Fabric adds support for smart contracts written in Solidity.
Hyperledger Fabric believes in expanding choices. With the wide adoption of Solidity and the Ethereum Blockchain in the real world, Solidity has taken its place in the Web3 space as being the number one language to learn. Hyperledger Fabric has now added supports for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode smart contracts. Now, contracts that are written in Solidity can be used for the Hyperledger Fabric. Along with the wide acceptance of Ethereum, Web3 has also been in the news for quite some time. Fabric also supports web3.js, which can be used to develop decentralized applications(DApps). The goal behind this is to help developers create DApps using Hyperledger Fabric. Through the introduction of an EVM, it makes sure that Solidity, smart contracts and permissioned networks are not mutually exclusive.
Since the whole concept of Hyperledger Fabric is to reduce the time required to complete transactions on the blockchain and to facilitate this Fabric uses fewer nodes to speed up transaction time. Many nodes are used to run and store these smart contracts, hence the network has to be mindful of the runtimes being supported. Languages affect how many nodes a smart contract may take and how intensive the contract might be. Solidity supports very optimized smart contracts which work hand in hand with Hyperledger Fabric making sure that runtimes are not very high and thus, the transaction speed is not affected by a lot.
As you know every line of code which you run in your smart contract requires a certain amount of gas fees for it to be computed in the EVM. For every transaction that is being run in EVM, it requires gas as well. This ensures that the miners don't risk DoS which might result in them being stuck in an infinite loop. If enough gas is not provided the transaction will not be executed and eventually fail. The current version of EVM, it requires a large amount of gas. This might be changed in the next quarter as Ethereum is in talks of changing the Proof of Work to Proof of Stake which will reduce gas prices to a fraction.
The integration is fully complete with Fab3, which acts as an API. It defines a structured way in which the clients can interact with the blockchain. It also supports instructions to allow DApps to be written using the web3.js library.
You can try out this feature by following this tutorial
Real Life Use Cases of Hyperledger Fabric
Online Parts Marketplace
Honeywell Aerospace has created an online marketplace with the help of Hyperledger Fabric which allows users to purchase aircraft parts. Purchasing these parts usually takes weeks and months, it involves the buyers travelling and meeting with the seller before they can decide on the parts. With Fabric it has reduced this time to just days, where the buyer can interact with the seller directly and also verify their identity which helps prevent counterfeit. Now the buyer can just buy the parts as they do from an eCommerce site.
Improve Healthcare Claims
Healthcare claims have traditionally been a challenge for a patient who chooses to buy from a specific healthcare provider. Change healthcare is doing this with the help of Hyperledger Fabric. To do this, they are defining requirements, testing them against millions of transactions and choosing the right platform.
There are many more use cases with Hyperledger Fabric that can be applied to real-life businesses, transactions and help improve the daily life of the consumer who chooses to consume from these businesses while making the businesses function smoothly.
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