Blockchain consortium Hyperledger launches Hyperledger Fabric 2.0

Open Source blockchain consortium Hyperledger announced the general availability of Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 release.

Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 introduced major upgrades such as Decentralized governance for smart contracts, New chaincode application patterns for collaboration and consensus, External chaincode launcher, Private data enhancements, State database cache for improved performance on CouchDB and Alpine-based docker images.

The introduction of Alpine Linux container images brings down the size of containers considerably.

Executive Opinion

Executive Director, Hyperledger, Brian Behlendorf, said, "Hyperledger Fabric has established itself as a popular and practical distributed ledger framework and has powered much of the transition from conceptualization to commercialization we've seen in enterprise blockchain. Fabric 2.0 is a new generation framework developed by and for the enterprises that are building distributed ledger capabilities into the core of their businesses. This new release reflects both the development and deployment experience of the Fabric community and confirms the arrival of the production era for enterprise blockchain."

IBM Fellow and VP of Blockchain Platform, IBM, Jerry Cuomo, said, "IBM is excited about this key milestone in Hyperledger Fabric's development lifecycle. We are proud to have been part of the community that has collaborated on its development, and we are eager to upgrade the IBM Blockchain Platform -- industry's first multi-cloud implementation of Hyperledger Fabric -- to leverage the new capabilities and improved performance in this milestone release."

Hyperledger Fabric 2.0

This release majorly deals with the management of the chaincode (or smart contract) lifecycle. The overall goal was to maximize flexibility, remove bottlenecks and create more options to distribute governance, notes the announcement.

Now multiple organizations can leverage the new Fabric chaincode lifecycle to come to an agreement on the parameters of a chaincode. Additionally, the introduction of automated checks to chaincode functions is also supported. Thus Organizations can validate additional information before endorsing a transaction proposal. Additionally, the introduction of new peer cache provides fast local cache reads. Hence, performance bottlenecks with expensive lookups during endorsement and validation phases are eliminated.

To support production upgrades, Hyperledger has provisioned neat upgrade documentation.