Hyperledger fabric: a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains

Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains, and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. It is presented as the first truly extensible blockchain for running distributed applications: it supports modular consensus protocols so the system can be tailored to particular use cases and trust models, and it is the first blockchain to run distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages without any systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model through a portable notion of membership that can integrate with industry-standard identity management.

To support this flexibility, Fabric introduces a novel blockchain design that revamps how blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks, and the paper details its architecture, design rationale, implementation, and distributed application programming model. The authors evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency, showing end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second with sub-second latency in certain popular deployment configurations while scaling well to over 100 peers, demonstrating that a permissioned blockchain can meet demanding performance requirements.