On January 30, 2020, Hyperledger, hosted by The Linux Foundation, formally released Hyperledger Fabric v2.0, marking a significant milestone in distributed ledger technology (DLT). It is clear that blockchain technology is progressing at a rapid pace, as indicated by this milestone.

From the start, Hyperledger Fabric was designed to be an enterprise-grade, distributed ledger platform that offers modularity and versatility for a broad set of industry use cases. Fabric has an architecture that is permissioned, highly modular, and offers a unique approach to pluggable consensus that provides for superior performance and low latency of finality/confirmation. To meet a broad range of use cases, it provides a number of approaches to privacy to meet the needs of the application.

Developers can write smart contracts written in widely adopted programming languages such as Go, Java, and Javascript — it even supports Ethereum’s Solidity smart contracts language. Finally, for operators, it has been specifically designed for continuous operations supporting live upgrades and asymmetric version support.

Learn how Hyperledger makes revolutionary cooperation and innovation possible

Hyperledger Fabric 2.0: The evolution

Hyperledger Fabric was the first project incubated at Hyperledger, seeded by a joint contribution from IBM and Digital Asset Holdings (DAH). Since then, with the support and guidance of Hyperledger Fabric community, no fewer than 400 open source developers from more than 60 companies large and small have collaborated together to design and implement a DLT framework that is practical and meets the demands of industry.

Hyperledger Fabric was the first project in the Hyperledger greenhouse to deliver a v1.0 release, in July 2017. Since then, the insights and feedback from the growing community of users of Fabric have led to several new features and enhancements. The collaborative effort paved the way to the community declaring a Long Term Support (LTS) milestone just one year ago with Hyperledger Fabric v1.4 which gave the community of users and vendors a stable platform. Since then, the community has continued to evolve the platform, which brings us to today’s news — the availability of Hyperledger Fabric v2.0.

In developing Hyperledger Fabric v2.0, the focus was centered around the usability from the perspective of the community’s vast experience deploying and managing Hyperledger Fabric. The Fabric development community leveraged that experience and feedback to evolve the platform to be easier and more secure than before — all while preserving the ability to do a rolling migration from one version to the next.

This next generation of Hyperledger Fabric can help enterprises build their DLT solutions more efficiently and securely. Key enhancements and new features of Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 include:

• New decentralized chaincode (smart contract) lifecycle management
• New chaincode application patterns
• New external chaincode launcher
• New consensus type of Raft
• Private data to ensure data privacy
• Performance improvements

Read the What’s New documentation for more details on the new features in Fabric v2.0.

The importance of open source and the community

Behind every great open source technology, sits a strong community. The Hyperledger Fabric community has continuously improved the security, usability, robustness, performance and feature set — all qualities that are of critical importance to enterprise users. IBM is proud to be amongst the leaders that helped shape Hyperledger Fabric’s evolution based on the vast experience and insights we gained from the hundreds of deployed IBM Blockchain Platform networks.

Of course, IBM was not alone! The Hyperledger Fabric development community is comprised of many world class technology providers and individual contributors, all collaborating to evolve blockchain technologies at record pace. Due to the diverse ecosystem, it supports the foundation for innovation, quality, and quick delivery that only open source can provide.

Given that blockchain is such a foundational technology, one that is poised to transform and optimize the way the world transacts, it only makes sense for the technology to be open and for a variety of contributors to be involved.

Production blockchain solutions built with Hyperledger Fabric 

Hyperledger Fabric has quickly become one of the most popular open source DLT projects with hundreds of deployments globally. In 2019, 30 companies in the Forbes Blockchain 50 were using it — more than any other framework. We are seeing Hyperledger Fabric continuing to gain traction in industry.

To date, no other distributed ledger technology framework enjoys the breadth of adoption by Cloud Service Providers such as AWS, Azure, IBM Google, Alibaba and Oracle, than Hyperledger Fabric.

Blockchain technology has moved beyond the hype and there exist hundreds of networks in production today. Many of the production blockchain solutions in production today are built with Hyperledger Fabric. Take a look at a list of tools and solutions built with Hyperledger Fabric.

Build, operate, and grow Hyperledger Fabric networks and solutions

IBM Blockchain Platform enables you to create a Hyperledger Fabric network with a few clicks and provides an easy-to-use interface for managing networks, channels, and smart contracts. When you are ready to grow your network, IBM Blockchain Platform makes it easy to invite new members, create channels, customize governance policies, manage the identity credentials of network participants, and much more.

Leveraging Hyperledger Fabric, IBM Blockchain Platform enables a new kind of distributed business network founded on principles focused around enterprise use.

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