Pros and Cons of Hyperledger Fabric for Blockchain Networks

Enterprises are increasingly interested in blockchain due to its promise of improved efficiency and cost reduction. However, they can’t use the permissionless public blockchains because of lack of privacy, low scalability, and less transaction throughput.
Businesses need enterprise blockchains, and Hyperledger Fabric is increasingly looking like a good option for them.

In this article, I explain pros and cos of Hyperledger Fabric for blockchain networks. However, I will first briefly describe why businesses require enterprise blockchains over public blockchains.

Why Hyperledger Fabric for blockchain

Businesses can’t use public blockchains due to the following reasons:
  • Privacy issues: Public blockchains like Bitcoin are permissionless. Anyone can join it, including anonymous and pseudonymous users. Many businesses such as financial services institutions and healthcare providers work under stringent privacy requirements. They can’t allow just anyone to see their sensitive information. Find out more about this in this article “Fundamental challenges with public blockchains”.
  • Scalability: Most public blockchains have low scalability because all the nodes on the network are required to process transactions. This also results in low transaction throughput.
  • Immutability of smart contracts: Smart contracts can’t be changed once deployed and their execution results are irreversible. Businesses need ways to ensure they are bug-free before deploying these.
  • Storage issues: Since every full node stores all the data on the public blockchain, storage requirements are very high, continually increasing over time. This excessive storage redundancy isn’t practical for businesses.
  • Unsustainable consensus algorithm: Bitcoin and Ethereum use the ‘proof of work’ (POW) algorithm, which is requires lots of computing power and is energy-intensive. As time passes, the processing power and energy requirements increase making it impractical in the business context. More information about POW is found in this article “Proof of work vs proof of stake comparison”.
  • Lack of governance: No one controls public blockchains, making it the responsibility of individual developers or developer communities to execute improvement projects. Businesses need sufficient governance to run blockchain effectively over long-term.
Businesses have specific requirements from a blockchain network:
  • They need a blockchain where they can control who joins the network, and they must be able to validate the identity of a new user with their organizational identity management system;
  • Enterprises need scalability and fast transaction execution;
  • Businesses must be able to set access control rules for their sensitive information;
  • The consensus mechanism should account for the business workflow where there is a separation of duty between a requestor, approver, and record-keeper.
  • The network should have high resilience;
  • Troubleshooting should be as automated as possible;
  • Maintainability should be high;
  • A proactive governance to develop right tools and processes for long-term effective operations.

Hyperledger Fabric is a platform that businesses can use to build their enterprise blockchains tho address these issues and meet their business requirements.

Courtesy : https://www.devteam.space/blog/pros-and-cons-of-hyperledger-fabric-for-blockchain-networks/

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