Second distributed ledger project from Hyperledger announced

The newly released Sawtooth 1.0 joins its sister project, Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, which was released in July last year. Today, on-chain governance is popular when

it comes to open source distributed ledger products. It lets members adjust the rules on-the-fly as required and get dynamic consensus to modify the blockchain consensus protocol as the technology advances.

Sawtooth 1.0 offers advanced capabilities like executing transactions in parallel and supporting multiple languages and Ethereum. James Mitchell, CEO at Bitwise IO (a vendor that helps companies build applications on top of Sawtooth), was drawn to these features.

Just as Linux has many flavours, there are different open source blockchain projects that meet different needs and develop different approaches to solving common problems. Hyperledger actually has several blockchain projects in various stages of development along with a number of specialised tools. Sawtooth 1.0 is available for download now.

According to Mitchell, who is also a big contributor to the Sawtooth project, “We were attracted to it because of the focus on fundamentals. We saw a lot of platforms based on Bitcoin’s work. Sawtooth had some key points on what [we believed] a distributed ledger needed.” That included a mechanism for adversarial trust and mechanisms to guarantee the trust.

Brian Behlendorf, executive director at Hyperledger, sees room for more than one approach to distributed ledgers and the market can decide which one is best. “Let’s leave it up to the developers to decide what features and differences they want to make, and let the market decide if this is a meaningful difference or not,” he said.

Hyperledger aims to create common distributed ledger technology that enables organisations to build and run robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions. The project has grown to more than 185 members since its inception. It covers industries such as finance, healthcare, the Internet of Things, credit card services, supply chain and aeronautics, among several others.

Mitchell agrees with Behlendorf’s views, saying, “All of these platforms will mature past 1.0. One of the exciting things is that there is a ton of cross-pollination, and we can afford to try different things and see what’s working well.”