Hyperledger Sawtooth
Candlefocus EditorHyperledger Sawtooth is an actively developed open source blockchain-as-a-service platform. Developed by The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Sawtooth is a member of Hyperledger, the umbrella open source blockchain project that develops enterprise-grade blockchain networks for secure and efficient transactions.
The Hyperledger Sawtooth platform seeks to enable applications on distributed ledgers in commercial environments, enabling users to create their own permission models tailored to their specific needs. It provides numerous features designed to increase its scalability, reliability, and system integrity.
One of the main features of Hyperledger Sawtooth is its modular architecture, which is divided into four main components; the application layer, the client layer, the consensus layer and the ledger layer. Housed by the application layer is the SDK – Sawtooth’s smart contract composer – which developers can use to write and install business logic for a blockchain network. This layer allows for the development of varied use cases and applications, giving Sawtooth its flexibility to run customized ledger systems on-demand.
The client layer of the Hyperledger Sawtooth framework is the interface that allows nodes to interact with the blockchain. It provides the components necessary to execute transactions and maintain the structure of the underlying cryptographically secure ledger. It allows for connections to the other peer nodes using Transport Layer Security (TLS) for secure transactions and provides data about the transactions to the clients.
The consensus layer provides the agreement needed between the network peers to produce a shared ledger state, providing a balance between security and performance. Hyperledger Sawtooth provides two options in this layer: Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET). While PBFT is a consensus algorithm used to verify the validity and order of transactions on the network, PoET is a lightweight alternative which requires that each node take a random amount of time to generate a signature, and only one signature wins.
Finally, the ledger layer houses and encodes the data which is being transacted on the network. Variables can be denoted as state on Hyperledger Sawtooth, with each node maintaining its own ledger of digital records and states.
The benefits of using Hyperledger Sawtooth are notable. It offers improved scalability, enabling a large network to accommodate a large amount of transactions, provides high performance and privacy, allowing for higher throughput and transactions that are off the record, and provides a number of consensus algorithms for privacy and scalability without sacrificing speed.
In conclusion, the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform provides the framework necessary for businesses to develop enterprise-grade blockchain networks that are secure and reliable, while also being able to create permission models tailored to their needs, in order to facilitate efficient transactions. The combination of features offered by the platform makes Hyperledger Sawtooth an attractive and cost-effective blockchain solution for a wide variety of applications.