Distributed ledger platform Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 now available

Hyperledger, the open source umbrella group of blockchain projects announced today Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 is now available. For the Hyperledger community, this is a big milestone as it marks the second blockchain framework that has reached production-ready status.

This Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 release is the culmination of work from several companies intent on creating a distributed ledger designed for the enterprise.

Dan Middleton, Hyperledger Sawtooth Project Maintainer said:

“We would not have the rich features or deployment maturity today without the collaboration and contributions from these organizations (alphabetically): Active Ticketing, Amazon Web Services, Bitwise.io, Cloudsoft, Context Labs, Dot BC Media, Ericsson, Hacera, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft Azure, Monax, Open Music Initiative, PokitDok, R3, T-Mobile, Wind River, and several independent engineers.”

With the launch of Sawtooth 1.0, the following new enterprise features are introduced:

• On-chain governance – Utilize smart contracts to vote on blockchain configuration settings such as the allowed participants and smart contracts.
• Advanced transaction execution engine – Process transactions in parallel to accelerate block creation and validation.
• Support for Ethereum – Run solidity smart contracts and integrate with Ethereum tooling.
• Dynamic consensus – Upgrade or swap the blockchain consensus protocol on the fly as a network grows, enabling the integration of more scalable algorithms as they are available.

Middleton continued:

“Many of these features have been in test networks for three to six months by this point. During that period we’ve been focused on stability and performance. The engineering you won’t see are automated integration test networks we’ve built to run each release candidate build through a rigorous 7-day, multi-node test. This is in addition to the existing continuous integration testing we’ve had in place for years.”

“Where will Hyperledger Sawtooth focus its efforts in 2018? Well, we are already in motion on more work in performance and new work in privacy. To the former, we are looking at both consensus and core implementation. We’d like to add another consensus option for those planning to run small networks. Within the core, we are looking at replacing targeted python modules with optimized components in languages like Rust. On the privacy front, we have contributors investigating both trusted execution and zero-knowledge cryptographic approaches. We look forward to our enterprise users contributing back pilot implementations in these spaces as well.”