Interoperability

This article is a translation of the German IOTA Beginner’s Guide by .

Interoperability

Hyperledger Bridge

Hyperledger is an open source collaboration under the umbrella of LF Edge. The goal of its development is to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Hyperledger is by far the largest permissioned blockchain project in the industry, but also among smaller companies and startups. It is a global collaboration developed and driven by the Linux Foundation (LF Edge) and includes leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chain, manufacturing and technology. In addition to Linux LF Edge, IBM and Intel, the driving forces behind Hyperledger include Fujitsu, Oracle, SAP, VMware, Cisco, Red Hat, Bosch and Samsung.

Important: The project itself requires approval and is only accessible to a closed community. Anyone who wants access to the project must first become a member of the Foundation.

Hyperledger
Source: hyperledger.org

Hyperledger can currently (Sep 2019) be divided into the following projects that require approval:

  • Hyperledger Besu: Open source Ethereum client developed under the Apache 2.0 license and written in Java. It can run on Ethereum’s public network or on networks with private permissions, as well as on test networks such as Rinkeby, Ropsten, and Görli.
  • Hyperledger Burrow: Burrow is a smart contract engine. It is the first of its kind, released in December 2014. It provides a modular blockchain client with a permissioned smart contract interpreter built in part to Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) specifications.
  • Hyperledger Fabric: A permissioned distributed ledger framework that offers modularity, versatility and privacy options to meet a wide range of industry use cases from finance to healthcare to supply chain and more. It enables, using the Docker container platform, smart contracts to be implemented easily and flexibly.
  • Hyperledger Indy: Designed specifically for decentralized identity. It provides tools, libraries and reusable components to create and use independent digital identities based on blockchains or other distributed ledgers for interoperability.
  • Hyperledger Iroha: A user-friendly, modular, distributed blockchain platform with its own unique consensus and ordering service algorithms, a comprehensive authorization model, and support for multiple signatures.
  • Hyperledger Sawtooth: A modular platform for building, deploying, and running Distributed Ledgers. It includes a novel consensus algorithm, Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET), which targets large, distributed validator populations with minimal resource consumption.
  • Hyperledger Aries: Infrastructure for blockchain-based peer-to-peer interactions. It provides a common, reusable, and interoperable toolkit for initiatives and solutions focused on creating, transmitting, and storing verifiable digital credentials.
  • Hyperledger Transact: A platform-independent library that handles the execution of smart contracts, including all aspects of scheduling, transaction dispatch and management.
  • Hyperledger Quilt: Provides interoperability between ledger systems by implementing ILP, a primary payment protocol used to transfer value between distributed and non-distributed ledgers.
  • Hyperledger Ursa: A shared cryptographic library that allows individuals (and projects) to avoid duplicating other cryptographic work and hopefully increase security.
  • Hyperledger Caliper: A blockchain benchmark tool that allows users to measure the performance of a given blockchain implementation against a set of predefined use cases.
  • Hyperledger Cello: Aims to integrate the on-demand, “as-a-service” delivery model into the blockchain ecosystem to reduce the effort required to create, manage and terminate blockchains.
  • Hyperledger Explorer: Can view, access, provision or query blocks, transactions and associated data, network information, chain-codes and transactions, and any other relevant information stored in the ledger.
  • Hyperledger Grid: A WebAssembly-based project for building supply chain solutions. It includes a set of libraries, data models, and SDKs to accelerate development for supply chain smart contracts and client interfaces.

IOTA and Hyperledger

Hyperledger’s permissioned data functionalities have been combined with IOTA’s permissionless data functionalities.

When the IOTA Foundation joined the Linux Foundation to work together on LF Edge, among other things, it was already known that the IF had been working for some time on an internal Hyperledger bridge (Connector) to drive the distribution of the permissionless IOTA functions for data and value transfer further. This development work has now been successfully completed and the IOTA technology has been migrated into the Hyperledger ecosystem.

As the Hyperledger Fabric project becomes more popular for supply chain and asset tracking projects in the industry, the IOTA Foundation introduces the IOTA Connector, which can be used to mirror data from Hyperledger into the Tangle. This allows Hyperledger to leverage all available IOTA features such as royalty-free payments using IOTA tokens, encrypted data transactions, and public / private message chains (IOTA Streams). At this point, the IF considers Hyperledger Fabric DLT – where all data is initially stored and managed – as the primary source of truth.

The symbiosis of these very different technologies allows the IOTA Tangle to act as a connector between different permissioned Hyperledger Fabric-based systems in different enterprises. As Hyperledger is applied more to internal enterprise operations, the interplay of the two technologies enables tamper-proof external data exchange for permission-requiring data silo-based systems, plus direct monetary compensation (IOTA tokens) for this data is now possible if desired.

As a very exciting and great result of this newly gained data exchange capability, any Hyperledger Smart Contract (called Chaincode) execution can now trigger a request to the IOTA Tangle. This process allows Hyperledger Fabric smart contract execution results to be stored / updated on the Tangle and payments to be made between IOTA wallet holders. It is also possible to read data from the Tangle and trigger Hyperledger Fabric’s smart contract execution based on the retrieved transaction data or payment confirmation. This opens up endless possibilities for a variety of new applications.

Notice: Smart contracts in Hyperledger Fabric can be written in multiple programming languages. For the two most common ones, IOTA connectors are provided in Go and JavaScript (Github).

Conclusion

This is a very big step for the IOTA Foundation towards becoming a standard transfer protocol in the industry. I always compare Hyperledger to the intranet, which can only be used within your own company. In contrast, IOTA technology (IOTA Streams, Micropayments, …) can also be used for secure external data exchange with other companies.

This interoperability and the use of smart contract technology will result in a variety of new applications in the future, and the acceptance of IOTA technology in the industry will thus receive an enormous boost.

More Details

Official Github

Integrate Hyperledger Fabric with the IOTA Tangle – IF

Sources

https://www.lfedge.org/

https://www.hyperledger.org/

https://blog.iota.org/integrate-hyperledger-fabric-with-the-iota-tangle-9bc3ac873e82

Original source

https://iota-einsteiger-guide.de/hyperledger.html

Last Updated on 16. February 2021