The Challenge
The client wanted a tamper-evident, immutable digital transaction ledger for a private network of participating peers. As a government regulated entity, regulatory requirements required that all participants of the blockchain be known to all others. Further, it was decided that all smart contracts would be validated and managed by the collective network instead of a central authority.
How We Solved It
The infrastructure to implement blockchain networks with custom consensus mechanisms was built using Hyperledger Fabric. There are 3Hyperledger Fabric SDKs – Golang, Java and NodeJs. The Sphere blockchain consulting team used NodeJs. The Ethereum smart contract was written on Solidity language and the smart contract on Fabric was written on NodeJs. Individual transactions were defined and managed by the network which supported secure data-sharing. Each organization and user also received specifically generated private keys for authentication, digitally signing transactions, and creating Hyperledger addresses and ports.
Since all parties were known, the blockchain contained a genesis block where all of this information is stored. When nodes are added or removed, the Hyperledger network updates the genesis block. Further, each participating organization served both as a Peer Node and an Endorsing Peer Node.
To ensure transactions are completed quickly, every user in this network can request and complete data transactions in near real time.
The Results
Blockchain technology has great potential when it comes to data sharing capabilities. Implementing a blockchain with Hyperledger can increase security, and reduce the amount of time and resources required to complete trusted data transactions.
