The Hyperledger Foundation announces Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 has gone GA with a number of key features such as smart contract, a new consensus mechanism and Ethereum interoperability.
The Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 modular platform for building, deploying and running distributed ledgers has been released. This is the second of the Linux Foundation Hyperledger projects to reach this milestone. Last year the Hyperledger Fabric also hit 1.0 and is expected to go to 1.1 in the next few months. This year should also see at least one more of the nine currency projects hit the 1.0 milestone.
While many blockchain projects seek to distance themselves from their cryptocurrency roots, Sawtooth does not. It started life as Sawtooth Lake inside Intel until it was given to the Hyperledger Foundation. The goal was to learn from the security and scalability challenges of Bitcoin to make blockchain an enterprise ready solution.
There are now over 50 different contributors on the project including all the big contributors to the Hyperledger Foundation and many smaller developers.
According to Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “We’re beyond excited to see not one, but two of Hyperledger’s active projects hit 1.0. This is a huge testament to the strong collaboration of our growing community – I look forward to seeing even more products and services being powered by Hyperledger Sawtooth later this year.“
Sawtooth provides an alternative consensus mechanism
ET spoke with Behlendorf about Sawtooth. He told us that Sawtooth has taken a very different approach to Fabric. Fabric was focused on solving the database problem. Sawtooth is about the consensus algorithm.
Blockchain uses consensus algorithms. These set out to protect the integrity of the blockchain by proving that each block is the only version of the truth. Without this, blockchain advocates would not be able to meet the claim of immutability of the blockchain. There are a number of different consensus mechanisms currently being used and discussed for different blockchain implementations.
Behlendorf told ET: “Sawtooth set out to solve questions around the way Bitcoin works with blockchain. The first question was how do we solve the energy efficiency issues. The solution is to use the consensus mechanism called proof of elapsed time (PoET). It’s like Proof of Elapsed Work except it depends upon the CPU telling you ‘I’ve waited a certain amount of time, I didn’t use that CPU I just waited.’”
Source/More: Sawtooth 1.0 to speed up blockchain development – Enterprise Times
