Hyperledger: Build-a-Blockchain

Hyperledger is a Blockchain Platform that provides infrastructure and standards to create blockchains. Hyperledger is often confused as a blockchain in itself, but calling it a blockchain would be like calling the blueprint for your house a house. As such Hyperledger does not have one set of protocols, one distributed ledger, or even a cryptocurrency.  

Why should you care about something that isn't even a blockchain and doesn't even have a cryptocurrency that you can trade? For one, some of the largest companies are building some of the most significant enterprise blockchain projects today: Walmart, Visa, American Express, IBM, FedEx, and JP Morgan are just a few examples. These companies are flocking like moths to a flame for Hyperledger for two main reasons: a permissioned state and extensibility.

Couldn't they could be using the blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum that we know and love instead of spending time and energy creating new ones? Yes, but these are public permissionless blockchains, which means every transaction or deployment onto the blockchain is available to anyone. If a company is conducting a large amount of business on one of these blockchains, it could be giving competitors an insight into their operations. Imagine if Coca-Cola purchased all of its ingredients over one of these public ledgers. Their secret recipe might not stay such a secret.

Further, the extensibility of this open-source project is quite attractive. Companies can choose all their favorite features of blockchain technology and throw away the unnecessary overhead.

• Don't want to retrain all your developers from Java to Solidity? Great. Hyperledger supports general programming languages so you don't have to.
• Finding the Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus algorithm is overkill for your private chain. Me too. Hyperledger lets you get rid of it.
• Need to audit users on the chain? You can do so easily with their identity management services.
• Need an API? Check out their open-source API library.

This kind of privacy, flexibility and customization just isn't as easy on existing blockchains. If you were to learn one set of protocols you'd be smart to learn how Hyperledger works.

Here are just a few of the various projects that fall under Hyperledger's umbrella:

Hyperledger Fabric: This is the platform that companies are using to create their blockchains. Open source enterprise-grade permissioned blockchain platform. Established by the Linux Foundation, which has a great record of supporting open source projects. It is also the first distributed ledger platform to support general programming languages such as Java and Node.js. It also has a configurable consensus protocol, depending on a company's needs.  

Hyperledger Cello: Allows blockchain in an ad-hoc "as-a-service" model. This is known as Blockchain as a Service (Baas) which can quickly be built out using Cello.

Hyperledger Explorer: Web application tool facilitating simple interaction with your Hyperledger blockchain deployment. This includes invoking transactions, logging into digital wallets, or even high-level dashboards and visualizations of the state of the chain.

Hyperledger Burrow: Leverages Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs) to run smart contracts interchangeably with the public blockchain. This allows a combination of the speed and reliability of the permissioned chain with the scale of Ethereum.

Hyperledger SawTooth: Another blockchain platform allowing even more customizable consensus algorithms such as Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET). It also enables selective permissioning, where nodes within the same network can have different permissions.  

Hyperledger Caliper: Tool to measure the performance of your blockchain implementation. It will create reports and highlight key performance indicators for the health of your chain.