Introduction

Blockchain technology is also referred to as Distributed Ledger Technology, or DLT, as it works on a ledger that is distributed on multiple peers.

Now that we have a high-level understanding of what DLT is we are ready to jump into Hyperledger Fabric.

In this section, we will understand core Hyperledger fabric concepts and terminology at a high level and explore a “hello world” smart contract built on Hyperledger fabric.

Hyperledger Fabric is a “blockchain platform for the enterprise”. It is open source and modular - allowing different modules to be used, plug and play style. This enables a wide variety of enterprise requirements. It is designed to provide speed and scalability that is lacking in public chains due to proof of work requirement, which is essentially nonce mining.

Hyperledger fabric is ideal for building a permissioned, private blockchain business network. By private, it means that it should not be publicly open for everyone to run a peer or transact on the network. For enterprises, this a big requirement that Hyperledger fabric meets. Enterprises need more control on their data access policies. They also need a permissioned network so they can implement access control as per their own requirements.

At a high level, this is how a Hyperledger network works. The permission issuer issues or revokes permissions for all participants and infrastructure components of the network. This permission or access control in Fabric is based on X509 PKI infrastructure. Which means there is a trusted certificate authority that issues certificates to all participants.

Smart contracts hold logic that defines who can change what on the ledger. And participants write transactions on the ledger by invoking smart contracts.