Blockchain Platforms

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration focused on business blockchain frameworks, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.

Hyperledger Fabric is a platform for distributed ledger solutions underpinned by a modular architecture delivering high degrees of confidentiality, resiliency, flexibility and scalability. It is designed to support pluggable implementations of different components and accommodate the complexity and intricacies that exist across the economic ecosystem. Like other blockchain technologies, it has a ledger, uses smart contracts (“Chaincode”), and is a system by which participants manage their transactions.

Where Hyperledger Fabric breaks from some other blockchain systems is that it is private and permissioned. Rather than an open permissionless system that allows unknown identities to participate in the network (requiring protocols like Proof of Work to validate transactions and secure the network), the members of a Hyperledger Fabric network enroll through a trusted Membership Service Provider (MSP).

Hyperledger Composer

Fabric Composer is a new open-source application development framework, which simplifies the creation of Hyperledger Fabric blockchain applications. The tool aims at helping users to create blockchain applications based on Hyperledger Fabric without needing to know the low-level ( Go Programming ) details involved in blockchain networks.

Instead of building blockchain application directly on Hyperledger fabric using Chaincode in GO or Java programming language, we can quite easily code smart contract using Model file (.cto) and Angular JavaScript  using composer.

Technical advantages of Hyperledger Fabric for blockchain networks

1. Permissioned membership
2. Performance, scalability, and levels of trust
3. Data on a need-to-know basis
4. Rich queries over an immutable distributed ledger
5. Modular architecture supporting plug-in components
6. Protection of digital keys and sensitive data

Designed specifically for the financial sector, Corda is an open-source distributed ledger platform. It is developed by R3, which includes a consortium of more than 70 of the world’s major banks and insurers. This DLT is designed to record, manage, and synchronize financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. It records an explicit link between human-language legal prose documents and smart contract code. Unlike Bitcoin’s blockchain, which distributes the entire history of transactions among its nodes, with Corda, only verified transactions are shared in a way that only those parties with a legitimate need to know can see the data within an agreement.

Corda’s key features include:

• Corda has no unnecessary global sharing of data: only those parties with a legitimate need to know can see the data within an agreement
• Corda choreographs workflow between firms without a central controller
• Corda achieves consensus between firms at the level of individual deals, not the level of the system
• Corda’s design directly enables regulatory and supervisory observer nodes
• Corda transactions are validated by parties to the transaction rather than a broader pool of unrelated validators
• Corda supports a variety of consensus mechanisms
• Corda records an explicit link between human-language legal prose documents and smart contract code
• Corda is built on industry-standard tools
• Corda has no native cryptocurrency

Cross-border payments that can take hours with bitcoin or days with traditional financial transactions can go through in a matter of seconds with ripple. Like bitcoin, ripple’s payment network, RippleNet, uses blockchain technology. Ripple’s value proposition to banking clients is cheaper rates and faster transfer times for international payments. 

Ripple’s Consensus Ledger can process 1,000 transactions per second, and settles an international payment in three seconds on average. (He compares that to the bitcoin blockchain, which has slowed recently to two hours per transaction, creating a debate over block size; to be fair, both speeds are much faster than sending money with a traditional clearinghouse like Western Union.)

Ripple can also be used for in-country payments; many of the banks in Japan are using Ripple for domestic payments due to the sluggishness of the local payments network there. But for the most part, Ripple is focusing on cross-border payments because that’s the biggest pain point for banks and banking customers.