This note will compare the transaction flow approach followed in Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform compared to traditional Blockchain Platform such as Bitcoin.
In the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform, transaction flow happens in the following order. It starts with the endorsement of transactions by the endorsing peers, followed by collecting individual transactions from the different clients across the network by the ordering services nodes. In the end, validation of a list of transactions called a block by the committing peers. In this approach, different operations are designated by the different set of peer nodes, which gives the flexibility to scale the number of participants and transaction throughput based on the requirements.
The notion of endorsements gives a way to specify who in the system needs to validate a particular transaction. It is specifically designed for a permissioned blockchain platform where peer nodes know each other by their identity. This gives way to embedded business logic into the endorsement phase itself.
It works like this, if a sufficient number of endorsements haven’t been received from the specified peer nodes mentioned in the policy to a proposed transaction by the client, then that transaction will not go through further, and a non-malicious client will drop that transaction as it hasn’t received sufficient endorsements.
It eliminates non-deterministic transactions at a very early stage. It can be understood with an example: suppose all the endorsers execute the smart contract, and all are receiving different RW sets, then the client will drop this transaction as policy must say that at least a minimum number of endorsements are required with the same RW sets or outputs.
However, in the Traditional Blockchain Platform, such as the Bitcoin network, transaction flow happens in the following order. It starts with ordering, or the miners collect all the transactions for a certain duration, then validates the transactions and at the end performs Proof of Work (PoW). After PoW, whoever completes it first will append the newly formed block into the bitcoin ledger.
In these kinds of setup, everyone in the network executes the smart contract or script. However, scripts are less complex and require less computing power.
References
- NPTEL lecture series on Blockchains Architecture, Design and Use Cases by Prof. Sandip Chakraborty, IIT Kharagpur.
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