Hyperledger Labs

The Hyperledger Labs Stewards recently approved the Pluggable Hedera Consensus Service Hyperledger Lab. The Lab, developed by Hedera with input from Hyperledger Fabric community members and maintainers, enables a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network to connect to the Hedera Consensus Service running on the Hedera public network. 

For those unfamiliar, Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger network, operated by the Hedera Governing Council. Council members include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, FIS Worldpay, Google, IBM, Magazineluiza, Nomura, Swirlds, Swisscom Blockchain, Tata Communications, and Wipro. The Hedera network supports four publicly accessible network services: Cryptocurrency, File Service, Smart Contract, and the aforementioned Consensus Service.

The Hedera Consensus Service provides an Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant order of transactions that cannot be manipulated or crash due to the action of any small group of actors. Effectively providing your Hyperledger Fabric network with a verifiable auditable log of all transactions validated by an impartial decentralized network. The plug-in can also enable multiple Fabric networks to receive consensus timestamps from a single, decentralized ordering service.

The plug-in included in the Hyperledger Lab allows the Hyperledger Fabric BYFN (Build Your First Network) sample to connect each Fabric orderer to the Hedera Consensus Service. The orderers submit endorsed transactions to Hedera using the Consensus Service by referencing a common topic ID and independently subscribing to the stream of ordered transactions. The orderers then use the ordered transaction to create a block for their organization’s peer.

Any developer can get up and running with the Hedera Consensus Service today by following the instructions provided in the Lab’s open source GitHub repo: https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/pluggable-hcs/blob/master/first-network/README.md 

It will require a Hedera testnet account, which you can sign-up for at http://portal.hedera.com/. The sample then configures the Fabric network dependencies, connecting the orderers to the public testnet.

We hope that the Hyperledger Lab is only the start of our journey in the Hyperledger community. We’d appreciate any feedback and contributions you have as we look to continue to support users of the Hedera Consensus Service building with Hyperledger Fabric. In the future, we hope to expand upon this plug-in with support for the likes of Hyperledger Avalon and the Blockchain Interoperability Framework.

The growth in the number of blockchain platforms is booming. That is a good thing. Looking beyond a “one size fits all” platform sparks new possibilities and may lead to platform innovations we have yet to imagine. But the ecosystems developing around platforms must also interact for blockchain to achieve its full potential. 

With the future state of interoperability as an end goal, last year Accenture announced that we developed and tested two solutions that allow two or more blockchain enabled ecosystems to integrate. Since then, we developed a new solution specifically created for permissioned blockchains that works without a central connector node. I am happy to announce that we open sourced this new solution as Blockchain Integration Framework, a Hyperledger Lab.

Blockchain Integration Framework defines a communication model that lets permissioned blockchain ecosystems exchange any on-chain data or custom assets, independent of the platform. Specifically, it introduces an “interoperability validator” overlay network for each of the blockchain networks for which you want to exchange assets. Interoperability validators are known or broadly discoverable by the ecosystem and typically participants already taking part in the governance or consensus. 

Interoperability validators will collectively handle export requests from local nodes by verifying against their version of the ledger (steps 1 to 3). Each request is answered by a (configurable) minimum quorum of validator signatures (steps 4 and 5). The network can continue working even if some validators are down or not participating, assuming the minimum quorum can be guaranteed. Any secure off-chain communication system can deliver messages certified by a distributed ledger’s transfer validators (step 6). A proof coming from a foreign distributed ledger can be verified against the public keys of the transfer validators of that foreign distributed ledger either locally by the recipient or using on-chain logic – typically smart-contracts (step 7 and 8).

This tutorial demonstrates how to transfer a simple asset between a Hyperledger Fabric and a Quorum network. If you have a favorite DLT network, please consider contributing a connector. We encourage you to have a look at the source code and welcome any contributions no matter the size. Please reach out on the #blockchain-integration-framework chat channel with any questions.