Hyperledger is a blockchain based platform that provides solutions to the problems in the business. Its modular architecture delivers high level of confidentiality, resilience, flexibility and scalability. How Hyperledger differs from blockchain is that it is private and permissioned. Rather than an open permissionless system that allows unknown identities to participate in the network (requiring protocols like “proof of work” to validate transactions and secure the network), the members of a Hyperledger Fabric network enroll through a trusted Membership Service Provider (MSP).It’s designed to execute the different components of business and accommodate complexity and intricacies of the economic ecosystem. 

• Hyperledger allows user the ability to create channels, this is an important option for some networks that are competitors and want to make some transactions invisible to their competitors. If two participants form a channel then only them have a copy of the ledger and no other user can access the  data. 
• Hyperledger smart contracts are written in Chaincode that contain the business rule of the system, it is written in java or Go. Chaincode initializes and manages ledger state through transactions submitted by applications, its basic  principle is to separately encode each component. A chaincode typically handles business logic agreed to by members of the network, so it is similar to a “smart contract”.
• There are a number of consensus protocols presents hence it can be tailored accordingly for the different use cases. It serves to generate an agreement on the order and to confirm the correctness of the set of transactions constituting a block.

WHY HYPERLEDGER FABRIC ?

• It is a permissioned network, where the identities of all participants is known. In some sectors like financial and healthcare that  require data protection hence it is important to know who is accessing the information. 
• Transactions in hyperledger takes place in three phases: distributed logic processing and agreement (“chaincode”), transaction ordering, and transaction validation and commitment. This improves the network scalability and performance. The three phases can be understood by the image given below:

1. The transaction application is submitted to an endorsing peer.
2. The endorsing peer approves or rejects a transaction application, the endorser execute the chaincode which is then sent to the application.
3. Approved transaction is then sent to the Ordering service which creates block of transaction which are then delivered to the committing peer.
4. Committing peer ensures that  endorsement policy was met and checks in the read/write sets to detect confliction transactions. If both checks pass, block is committed to the ledger.

Because only the signatures and read/write set are being sent around the network, scalability and performance are optimized. In addition, because only the endorsers and the committers truly see the transaction, fewer levels of trust are required in different parts of the Blockchain system, offering more security.

• Data confidentiality is important in business due to competitiveness, protection laws and regulation on confidentiality of personal data, channels supported in Hyperledger allow only specific data to be shared.  

APPLICATIONS OF HYPERLEDGER FABRIC 

Tracing diamond: During its mining diamond goes through a lot of hands , fraud or double dealing or duplicity can happen at any step and without a proper system hence it is hard to determine at which step fraud took place. With the help of hyperledger, a consortium of companies can be formed. Companies like miners, separators, exporters, retailers. All the process in the mining are tracked and recorded as well as transparent due to which diamond can be tracked at any place at any time. 

Food source tracking:Hyperledger is used to track the processing of a product from the beginning to the final product. Companies form a consortium to gain the trust of customers and enhance the trust of food supply. The solution provide authorized users immediate access to the food supply chain data. The complete history and current location of any individual food item can be known. If a defect is present in food for example e coli is present in food you may not know where in the process it infected the food but with the help of hyperledger, it can be known where the food was infected. 

Health industry: For a health industry running on blockchain to share information between different medicine institutes, pharmaceutical  industry for research purposes and among various hospital for consults may lead to revelation of confidential patient data which is a breach of the policy and may lead to feud. To avoid this, hyperledger is used to through which only selected information is stored between selected participants. 

B2B Contract: Business contracts can be codified to allow two or more parties to automate contractual agreements in a trusted way. Although information on blockchain is naturally “public”, B2B contracts may require privacy control to protect sensitive business information from being disclosed to outside parties that also have access to the ledger. 

Pharmaceuticals: Small and medium sized pharmaceutical retailers in China find it difficult to recover payments from the hospitals after delivering of drugs which makes it harder for them to get loans from banks. Working with IBM, Hejia has established a hyperledger blockchain-based business network among these supply chain participants. By tracking drugs through the supply chain and encrypting trading records, the transparency of the blockchain can help establish the authenticity of the transaction. In turn, this may help lower the credit risk profiled by financing institutions, which should allow the payment period to be shortened, possibly to the first or next trading day. Overall, the platform is designed to help to reduce the turnover time of funds on both sides of the supply chain and allow banks to be more informed and grant access to funding for small and medium pharmaceutical retailers. Basically what its doing is providing a transparent and efficient financing services based on blockchain.  It eliminates inefficiency and speeding up new business transactions. 

Digital identity:Given the growing data breaches people are  concerned with their data security. The method used today to secure data is outdated and require improvement, decentralized approach for the identity management is going to change how data used to be secured. A permissioned blockchain ledger will be how individuals control when, where and with whom they share their credentials. 

Payment: Hyperledger is a private decentralized network which enables secure transaction between two parties, interledger is a concept financial sectors are working upon. Interledger focuses on connecting different ledgers, it is easy to make transactions via the same channels however same is not the case for  transaction between different channels. Interledger is designed to enable communication between different international payment systems around the world. The idea is that any payer should be able to pay any payee, quickly and at little or no cost, without the need for both parties to set up accounts on the same global payment service. Since the model is  based on blockchain it is secure, decentralized and provide transparency to some extent.