Hyperledger FireFly V1.3 is Now Available

The Hyperledger FireFly community is pleased to announce the release of version v1.3! Enhancements in this release make the industry’s first open-source Web3 Gateway an even more powerful platform for tokenization, multi-chain interoperability, and building blockchain-based applications. 

The latest FireFly release marks the project's first update following its approval for graduated status by the Hyperledger Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) in October. It has been a thrilling year of expansion for the project. 

Let's take a look at what's new!

Namespace Isolation

Previously, each blockchain plugin had a single event stream. In Hyperledger FireFly v1.3.0, we introduced one event stream per namespace. This update ensures complete isolation per namespace, allowing FireFly to replay events specific to each namespace instead of sharing a common event stream across namespaces. 

This enhancement eliminates any overlap between namespace runtimes, promoting high availability without introducing breaking changes. Batch listeners now operate independently, and streaming from connectors is also autonomous, reducing dependencies on reloads or changes. 

Invoke with data

The core mission of Hyperledger FireFly is to allow you to connect to any blockchain, to invoke any smart contract and stream any events. A secondary capability core to the runtime is its ability to handle messaging and data coordination around the blockchain. An example here might be in orchestrating workflows between two parties in a multi-party workflow. 

In this release, we’ve expanded this functionality to enable you to use your own custom smart contracts, allowing you to associate data with any contract function of your choice. This makes FireFly more customizable for an end user and extends the batch pin feature that FireFly uses in multi-party setup. 

For any use case that wants to trigger events like making a payment, sending an invoice, or delivering goods upon receipt of a blockchain transaction, this is an important upgrade.

Performance Enhancements to the Transaction Manager

Hyperledger FireFly is a highly versatile enterprise tool known for its pluggability, which includes the blockchain connector, persistence layer, and data exchange. This flexibility allows for seamless integration across components and ecosystems, driving adoption across use-cases.

FireFly provides a toolkit for building the blockchain connector that includes transaction management and event streaming. A pluggable framework for building connectors to different chains. In this release, significant enhancements across the board have been made to the toolkit for performance and usability. It now supports PostgreSQL, a more robust persistence choice over the existing LevelDB and extends the API with rich queries for diagnosis.

Increased Performance with Hyperledger Besu

In this release, the community took steps to make Hyperledger FireFly and Besu work even more powerfully together. We’ve seen, as covered in recent webinars and blogs hosted by Hyperledger Foundation, that financial use cases are increasingly landing on Besu as the de facto EVM client for enterprises, which want to maximize performance to meet the speed of business. 

With version 1.3 of FireFly, we’re maximizing Hyperledger Besu’s potential as a conduit for modern finance. From coordinating transactions to managing state, handling off-chain flows and advancing privacy, Besu and FireFly combine to create a powerful enterprise-grade engine for tokenization platforms and asset management. 

Tezos Connector

Tezos is a popular protocol for building decentralized applications for digital assets and tokenization, voting and governance systems, and secure and auditable smart contracts. The new FireFly Tezos connector brings all the benefits of FireFly to Tezos builders. The connector includes remote transaction signing with a signatory capable of integration with a variety of key management solutions to submit transactions to the Tezos chain. 

The new Tezos connector was contributed to Hyperledger FireFly by Dzianis Andreyenka, Software Engineer at Instinctools Company and FireFly maintainer.

Join the Hyperledger FireFly Community!

We encourage you to check out the recent community call for more details on other enhancements made in this release. You can also learn more in the Hyperledger FireFly docs or download the CLI on the Hyperledger FireFly Github.

Since the last FireFly release, 64 new contributors and six new maintainers have joined the Hyperledger FireFly community. If you're not already a member, we invite you to join us! Whether you want to contribute to a project or stay up to date with what’s in flight, there is no better place to shape the future of blockchain. To get started, reach out to us on the Hyperledger Discord. We’d be happy to answer any questions you have. 

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If you’re interested in learning more about Hyperledger FireFly 1.3, check out the video below of a recent Meetup where the maintainers detailed the latest enhancements.