The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger consortium has gained steady momentum over the past year, growing to well over 100 members and releasing the 1.0 version of its Fabric platform in July. Now the Hyperledger Architecture Working Group has released the first in a planned series of formal papers outlining the consortium's approach. The first paper's goals are summarized as follows:
• Outline the overarching Hyperledger design philosophy for permissioned blockchain networks.
• Explain how our approach optimizes the development of flexible, interoperable enterprise blockchain technologies.
• Identify the core permissioned blockchain network components that the Architecture WG has been and will continue to define through its work.
• Provide a generalized reference architecture for consensus.
• Explore how each Hyperledger business blockchain framework manifests the reference architecture.
In the future, the working group will release papers focused on blockchain components, including the smart contract layer, communication layer, data store abstraction, crypto abstraction, identity services, policy services, APIs and interoperation.
POV: The group's decision to publish the paper series is a welcome move, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "Anything published on the topic of blockchain seems guaranteed to get attention, yet very little is published about the requirement to develop solution architectures that allow blockchain, or more correctly distributed ledger technology, to achieve its primary purpose of being a shared functionality between and across a wide variety of different enterprises, functions and enterprise applications," he says.
"All too often, current debate on distributed ledger technologies has been at cross-purposes due to lack of consistent understanding, causing the confusion that has long been a hallmark of blockchain," he adds. "Constellation Research welcomes this work and urges those working on deployments for digital business and IoT to read this paper."
The material is of good quality and it's also good to see the maturation of ledger technology and terminology, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "But I would state that the term blockchain is stale and obsolete," he adds. "With so many advanced ledgers now superceding the original public blockchains, I find the term misleading, and more so when one consortium attempts to standardize a reference architecture with certain services."
For one thing, it's too early to standardize a smart contract layer, as the concept remains debatable and will likely be settled over the next few years, Wilson says. The same goes for identity services. Some ledgers need an identity service while others actually implement identity as a service. That means identity layers will vary from one technology to another, Wilson says. "It cannot be a standard layer."
Wilson reiterates that blockchain has become a rather archaic term. "The Hyperledger work is several generations past what most people think of as a 'blockchain,'" he says. "The more this modeling advances, the more it becomes apparent that synchronous ledger technology is a better word for the category, and that different models will deliver SLT in different forms.
Go here to read Wilson's recent blog post in which he makes the case for synchronous ledger technology as a more suitable term.