by Content Team

14 January 2024

Blockchain

Note

If you are new to the blockchain technology, taking our Introduction to Blockchain Technology self-paced course is highly recommended. Also, for a comprehensive coverage of blockchain development with Sawtooth, taking our below self paced courses is highly recommended:

Intro to Hyperledger Sawtooth for System Admins

Hyperledger Sawtooth

Hyperledger Sawtooth is another general-purpose blockchain framework under Hyperledger Umbrella for building both distributed ledgers:

Compared to Fabric, Sawtooth is more similar to a public blockchain such as Ethereum, but still maintains some design principles.
Hyperledger enforces modularization, configurability, and flexibility in plugging in different implementations.
It maintains a cryptographically linked chain of transaction blocks, has a peer-to- peer validator network for relaying transactions between nodes, and relies on the gossip protocol to propagate all transactions to all nodes in the validator network.

While Fabric is a permissioned blockchain, Sawtooth supports both permissioned and permissionless blockchains. Permissions are set at both the network level and the local validator configuration level:

At the network level, its task is to configure who has permission to join the validator network.
At the local validator configuration level, it controls whether the validator has permission to access and process the transactions and messages.

Unlike other private blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, or Quorum, where a sensitive or private transaction may not be accessible to all nodes, all transactions in Sawtooth are stored in validators in the network; it relies on the local permissions to enforce transaction privacy.
The consensus in Sawtooth, by design, is pluggable too. Consensus algorithms can be configured at the network level during the initial validator network’s setup. They can be switched during the transaction process too. By default, it supports the Proof of Elapsed Time (PoEt) consensus protocol, although a voting-based consensus in RAFT is under development. PoET is a Nakamoto-style lottery-based consensus algorithm that relies on Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to select a validator to create blocks based on random waiting times, without using the PoW algorithm.

Similar to Fabric, Sawtooth supports smart contract development in many different programming languages, such as Java, JavaScript, Go, and on. In addition, it supports Solidity and Rust too, which are quite successful in the Ethereum community. One notable difference with transaction processing in Sawtooth is the ability to batch the transactions and ensure all or nothing when processing all the transactions in a batch. This could be quite useful for an enterprise that’s dealing with some business scenarios with large, complex transactions.

If you like to explore more private distributed ledger platforms, reading the below articles is highly recommended:

This article is written in collaboration with Brian Wu who is a leading author of “Learn Ethereum: Build your own decentralized applications with Ethereum and smart contracts” book. He has written 7 books on blockchain development.

Resources

Free Webinars on Blockchain

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Free Courses

Here is the list of our 10 free self-paced courses that are highly recommended:

Self-Paced Blockchain Courses

If you like to learn more about Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Ethereum or Corda, taking the following self-paced classes is highly recommended: