The Hyperledger Labs Stewards recently approved the Pluggable Hedera Consensus Service Hyperledger Lab. The Lab, developed by Hedera with input from Hyperledger Fabric community members and maintainers, enables a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network to connect to the Hedera Consensus Service running on the Hedera public network.
For those unfamiliar, Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger network, operated by the Hedera Governing Council. Council members include Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, FIS Worldpay, Google, IBM, Magazineluiza, Nomura, Swirlds, Swisscom Blockchain, Tata Communications, and Wipro. The Hedera network supports four publicly accessible network services: Cryptocurrency, File Service, Smart Contract, and the aforementioned Consensus Service.
The Hedera Consensus Service provides an Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant order of transactions that cannot be manipulated or crash due to the action of any small group of actors. Effectively providing your Hyperledger Fabric network with a verifiable auditable log of all transactions validated by an impartial decentralized network. The plug-in can also enable multiple Fabric networks to receive consensus timestamps from a single, decentralized ordering service.
The plug-in included in the Hyperledger Lab allows the Hyperledger Fabric BYFN (Build Your First Network) sample to connect each Fabric orderer to the Hedera Consensus Service. The orderers submit endorsed transactions to Hedera using the Consensus Service by referencing a common topic ID and independently subscribing to the stream of ordered transactions. The orderers then use the ordered transaction to create a block for their organization’s peer.
Any developer can get up and running with the Hedera Consensus Service today by following the instructions provided in the Lab’s open source GitHub repo: https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/pluggable-hcs/blob/master/first-network/README.md
It will require a Hedera testnet account, which you can sign-up for at http://portal.hedera.com/. The sample then configures the Fabric network dependencies, connecting the orderers to the public testnet.
We hope that the Hyperledger Lab is only the start of our journey in the Hyperledger community. We’d appreciate any feedback and contributions you have as we look to continue to support users of the Hedera Consensus Service building with Hyperledger Fabric. In the future, we hope to expand upon this plug-in with support for the likes of Hyperledger Avalon and the Blockchain Interoperability Framework.