Leveraging Hyperledger Fabric — Enterprise Blockchain Unleashes Viable Solutions
Located in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood, the Linux Foundation’s office is nestled in a square of red-roofed buildings that resemble homes rather than technology work spaces. Inside the Linux Foundation’s office sits Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger.
Behlendorf, who has been a leading figure in the open-source software movement for years, explained that the Linux Foundation has put together a series of collaborative software projects to draw attention to specific technologies. In the case of Hyperledger, the project was initiated in December 2015 to raise awareness of distributed ledgers and smart contract systems.
The Hyperledger community currently consists of 15 technology code bases, or projects, the first of which were Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth. Behlendorf told Cointelegraph that each are general purpose distributed ledger systems, yet there are deep architectural differences between them.
For instance, Hyperledger Fabric is intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture. It allows for components such as consensus and membership services to be plug-and-play. Hyperledger Fabric has been adopted by major cloud service providers including Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Baidu, Google, Huawei, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Tencent.
On the other hand, Hyperledger Sawtooth provides a flexible architecture that separates an organization’s core system from its application domain. This allows smart contracts to specify business rules for applications without needing to know the underlying design of a core system. Salesforce’s blockchain platform is based on Hyperledger Sawtooth.
With a market size estimated at over $900 billion in 2019, the global aerospace parts manufacturing market is expected to grow at a rate of 4.1% between 2020 to 2027, with the United States exhibiting the largest market for aircraft parts manufacturing. But unfortunately, achieving trust is one of the greatest challenges for companies operating in the aerospace industry.
Lisa Butters, a general manager at Honeywell, told Cointelegraph that blockchain can help ensure trust within the billion-dollar aerospace industry. Honeywell Aerospace has been providing products and services to leading commercial aircraft across the globe for over a century. In 2019, Honeywell developed a blockchain-based platform called GoDirect Trade, which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric.
According to Butters, GoDirect Trade is an “Amazon-like” online marketplace for used aerospace parts, which is a $4 billion per year industry. The platform leverages blockchain to prove the parts’ origin, while ensuring that each complies with safety standards. Butters said:
Butters mentioned that each aviation piece added to the GoDirect Trade platform immediately connects the layers of the supply chain. Everything is combined into a single, shared ledger of transactions, which is meant to transparently track an item’s movement. Traditionally, aviation parts are given paper “birth certificates” to document their movements, ownership and more. But paper documents are hard to keep track of and are prone to forgery.
According to Butters, less than 3% of the $4 billion in used aerospace parts sold per year is conducted online due to the notion that aerospace parts are typically tracked and resold using paper documents. This makes the process of selling parts online nearly impossible. Butters added that $7 million in transactions have already taken place on the GoDirect platform:
Yet while aircraft dismantlers, aerospace repair shops and major airline manufacturers use GoDirect Trade to list and purchase parts, a blockchain-based ecosystem doesn’t always fare well with major airline companies. Butters explained that the problem with building out a blockchain platform like GoDirect Trade is getting enterprises to share data.
