Long regarded as one of the most promising code bases hosted by the Hyperledger Blockchain consortium, Intel's Sawtooth software is officially ready for enterprise use.

Revealed today, version 1.0 of the technology provides what could be expected, features inspired by bitcoin and other public blockchains, but repositioned for the company. Still, what his team of 50 contributors (from Bitwise and R3 start-ups, to Red Hat and Capital One companies) will distinguish the solution is its modular functionality, designed to give businesses in all industries a length of time. ;advanced.

Among the first companies that already use Hyperledger Sawtooth are telecommunications giants Huawei and T-Mobile, which are building a decompiler for the software, and Amazon's e-commerce giant, which now lists Sawtooth as a blockchain partner.

Indeed, Intel's technical director and Hyperledger Sawtooth maintainer, Dan Middleton, have positioned the software as a way for companies whose requests exceed the capabilities of available public blockchains to leverage of its advantages.

Middleton tells CoinDesk:

"We think that if businesses really want to adopt blockchain, or a distributed ledger, then we should not give up blockchain's core properties by taking something from a public channel at the same time. business use. "

By backing up, Hyperledger Sawtooth is the second open-source blockchain platform to emerge with a company-ready version 1.0, closely following Hyperledger Fabric, which was provided by IBM and launched the Last year.

From a development perspective, the launch of 1.0 software solutions is an important step for any code base, as it means that maintainers are attached to core functionality, giving coders a sense of confidence that everything that's going on. they build will not break. a result of future upgrades.

"For us, it's a big event, both for the Sawtooth team because of the stability, but for Hyperledger, it's a growing community of developers working on blockchain," said Kelly Olsen, another Sawtooth maintainer and a member of the Hyperledger Consortium's Technical Steering Committee.

A familiar touch

But beyond the potential importance to developers, there is another differentiating factor highlighted by the Sawtooth team in the launch: the innovative method by which computer networks running the software can forge a consensus on critical events.

Specifically, Sawtooth marks the commercial debut of a consensus mechanism called PoET – or proof of elapsed time – a variation on an older system called Byzantine Fault Tolerance that allows users to reach a consensus, even in an environment where counterparties do not know it. other.

In comparison, other authorized blockchains require users to know each other and to trust each other. In this way, the blockchain platform is designed to resist denial of service attacks that become more likely in a more public blockchain, or in which unknown parts might interact.

However, compatibility is also sought with other blockchains of this nature. Especially in the final version is the support for the intelligent contract language Solidity, pioneered by the chain of Ethereum.

Smart contracts can also be written in Go, JavaScript, Python and more.

"The maintanters are not promoting an unauthorized version of Sawtooth," Olsen said. "But we are trying to make resilience still available."

Material Integration

In addition to some public blockchain features, Hyperledger Sawtooth has become known for the ease with which it can be integrated with hardware security solutions.

And at the heart of Sawtooth's PoET consensus mechanism in a streamlined capacity for integration with hardware security solutions called "secure runtime environment", among which is the new scalable Xeon processor. Intel.

The potential hardware integration was originally considered a controversial solution because it places the security considerations of a decentralized registry behind the protection of a potentially material fallible. But Sawtooth officials pointed out that this was part of a balance between leveraging the strengths of public blockchains and the volume of transactions and corporate security requirements.

In addition, they stated that even though only one company can provide the hardware that creates these reliable runtime environments, Sawtooth has not restricted this business to Intel.

Olsen concluded:

"Sawtooth is a hardware independent platform, there is no dependence on Intel hardware."

Intel Chip via Shutterstock

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