It is with great excitement that we would like to announce the release of Sawtooth version 1.1. Earlier this year we released Sawtooth 1.0, marking the production ready status of the platform. Since then the community has been hard at work adding new features, improving the privacy and performance of the platform, and growing the ecosystem.

The Sawtooth development team has been focused on two major new features for the Sawtooth 1.1 release, an improved consensus interface and support for WebAssembly smart contracts. For a full list of new features and improvements see the Sawtooth 1.1 Release Notes.

Improved consensus interface and new consensus options

While Sawtooth has always enabled ‘pluggable’ consensus and multiple consensus algorithms, recent experiences indicated that the existing consensus interface could be improved. Sawtooth has always aspired to be a modular platform that would enable lean experimentation and rapid adoption of new technologies, in particular, with regards to consensus. After analyzing a number of consensus algorithms that are available today, both Nakamoto (PoW/PoET) and classical (Raft/PBFT), the team decided to re-architect the consensus interface to improve the ease of integration. As a result of this new interface, the team has been able to port the existing Sawtooth consensus options, as well as add two new classical consensus options. Below is the state of these consensus options today:

Developer Mode (stable) PoET-Simulator (Crash Fault Tolerant) (stable) PoET-SGX (under development) Raft (alpha) PBFT (under development)



If you are interested in learning more about the new consensus interface, or writing your own, please see the detailed documentation.

Support for WebAssembly smart contracts (Sawtooth Sabre)

Sawtooth Sabre is a new smart contract engine for Sawtooth that enables the execution of WebAssembly-based smart contracts. WebAssembly (WASM) is a new web standard developed at the W3C with participation from major corporations like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The Sawtooth Sabre project leverages an existing open source WASM interpreter from the broader blockchain community. This on-chain interpreter enables developers to write their code in a variety of languages, compile it down to WebAssembly, and then deploy it directly to the Sawtooth blockchain.

In addition to new feature development, the Sawtooth developer team has continued research and development on improving the privacy and performance of the Sawtooth platform.

Privacy:

On the privacy front, a new Hyperledger Lab called ‘Private Data Objects (PDO)’ has been created. PDO enables smart contracts to execute off-chain with confidentiality and integrity through the use of trusted execution environments. For more information, take a look at this video or read the paper. Private data objects are just one way of addressing blockchain confidentiality, but expect to see more techniques available to Sawtooth over the coming months.

Performance:

On the performance front, much of the effort has been spent porting core Sawtooth components from Python to Rust. While Python was a great language to start with, and enabled the team to rapidly iterate and define the appropriate modularity in the architecture, it is not the most performant language. The 1.0 release stabilized many of the Sawtooth APIs, and as we began tuning the system, we identified bottlenecks arising from the design of the Python programing language. The speed and type safety of the Rust programming language made it a natural fit for the evolution of Sawtooth. As of today, roughly 40% of the Sawtooth validator components have been ported to Rust, a number that we expect will continue to increase over time.

Finally, in addition to adding new features and improving the robustness of the Sawtooth platform, we have also seen an explosion of activity in the community, with dozens of new developers and a variety of tools and applications being openly built on top the Sawtooth infrastructure. Notable new projects in the Sawtooth ecosystem include:

Applications:

Sawtooth Supply Chain – A platform focused on supply train traceability with contributors from Bitwise IO and Cargill.

Sawtooth Next-Directory – An application focused on role-based access control with contributors from T-Mobile.

Tools:

Truffle integration with Sawtooth-Seth – A new integration that allows you to deploy Ethereum smart contracts to Sawtooth using the leading Ethereum development tool, Truffle. Built in collaboration with the Truffle team.

Caliper support for Sawtooth – Benchmark Sawtooth in a variety of configurations with Hyperledger Caliper.

Sawooth Explorer – A blockchain explorer built for Sawtooth by the team at PokitDok.

Grafana monitoring – A set of tools for data collection and visualization for live Sawtooth deployments.

Part of a Grafana dashboard for a Sawtooth Testnet running Raft

The Sawtooth ecosystem and functionality is rapidly expanding, which wouldn’t be possible without the community behind it. I’d like to thank all of the developers who have put in time building tools and applications, or providing support, for their effort, including, but not limited to:

Adam Gering, Adam Ludvik, Adam Parker, Al Hulaton, Amol Kulkarni, Andrea Gunderson, Andrew Backer, Andrew Donald Kennedy, Anne Chenette, Arthur Greef, Ashish Kumar Mishra, Benoit Razet, Boyd Johnson, Bridger Herman, Chris Spanton, Dan Anderson, Dan Middleton, Darian Plumb, Eloá Franca Verona, Gini Harrison, Griffin Howlett, James Mitchell, Joel Dudley, Jonathan Langlois, Kelly Olson, Keith Bloomfield Kenneth Koski, Kevin O’Donnell, Kevin Solorio, Logan Seeley, Manoj Gopalakrishnan, Michael Nguyen, Mike Zaccardo, Nick Drozd, Pankaj Goyal, PGobz, Patrick BUI, Peter Schwarz, Rajeev Ranjan, Richard Berg, Ry Jones, Ryan Banks, Ryan Beck-Buysse, Serge Koba, Shawn T. Amundson, Sutrannu, Tom Barnes, Tomislav Markovski, Yunhang Chen, Zac Delventhal, devsatishm, feihujiang, joewright, kidrecursive, mithunshashidhara, and ruffsl.

If you’d like to join the community or learn more, you can find more information here:



Chat: #Sawtooth in Hyperledger RocketChat

Docs: Sawtooth 1.1 Documentation

Code: Sawtooth-core Github

Website: Hyperledger Sawtooth Homepage

Thanks for reading and look forward to more posts detailing new Sawtooth 1.1 features and improvements. We encourage developers to try these new feature out and give us feedback!