A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Ordering Service for the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform
This provides a more robust and scalable ordering service for business applications using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform, though it is an incremental improvement over existing ordering services.
The authors tackled the lack of a Byzantine fault-tolerant ordering service in Hyperledger Fabric by designing and implementing one using the BFT-SMaRt library, achieving up to ten thousand transactions per second and half-second transaction finalization across continents.
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine replication/consensus library, implementing also optimizations for wide-area deployment. Our results show that HLF with our ordering service can achieve up to ten thousand transactions per second and write a transaction irrevocably in the blockchain in half a second, even with peers spread in different continents.