2023, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Part A

Blockchains are tamper evident and tamper resistant digital ledgers implemented in a distributed fashion and usually without a central authority. At their basic level, they enable a community of users to record transactions in a shared ledger within that community, such that under normal operation of the blockchain network no transaction can be changed once published. This document provides a high-level technical overview of blockchain technology. The purpose is to help readers understand how blockchain technology works.

Hyperledger Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains. Fabric is currently used in more than 400 prototypes and proofs-of-concept of distributed ledger technology, as well as several production systems, across different industries and use cases. Starting from the premise that there are no "one-size-fits-all" solutions, Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models.

Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing blockchain platforms for running smart contracts that require code to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency.

Furthermore, it uses a portable notion of membership for realizing the permissioned model, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric takes a novel approach to the design of a permissioned blockchain and revamps the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks.

This paper describes Fabric, its architecture, the rationale behind various design decisions, its security model and guarantees, its most prominent implementation aspects, as well as its distributed application programming model. We further evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency. We show that Fabric achieves end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second in certain popular deployment configurations, with sub-second latency.