Hyperledger Sawtooth

Sawtooth, a project initiated by Intel, delivers another modular platform for distributed enterprise applications. It includes a novel consensus algorithm called Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET), which is optimized for efficient simulation of the Bitcoin Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus in a trusted corporate environment.

The Sawtooth whitepaper goes along familiar lines:

“Today's business processes for information sharing are burdened with intermediaries, inefficiencies, and security concerns. Through the use of distributed ledger technology (or blockchains), business processes between companies can be streamlined, and records can be kept in sync without the need for a central authority or manual reconciliation processes. This can help enterprises to reduce their costs and enable them to create entirely new ways of doing business. Sawtooth is a framework for building distributed ledgers for enterprise use, with a focus on modularity and extensibility. Sawtooth builds upon decades of state machine replication research and is designed to support any consensus mechanism or smart contract language.”

The authors also give credit to Bitcoin and Ethereum as inspiration for Hyperledger Sawtooth.

The evolutionary process of deriving new enterprise blockchain solutions from the leading public blockchains is described neatly as follows:

Since the release of Ethereum, a variety of other distributed ledgers implementations have been created to meet the needs of the enterprise. These distributed ledger implementations include software that expands upon existing protocols (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) and creates entirely new implementations (Corda and Fabric).

Hyperledger Sawtooth borrows many design elements from its public-blockchain predecessors, such as data structures, a peer-to-peer network protocol, and cryptography, and plugs them into the modular Hyperledger framework.