A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Ordering Service for the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform

Hyperledger Fabric is a flexible operating system for permissioned blockchains designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of this system is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. However, version 1 was launched in 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for this system on top of the BFT-SMART state machine replication/consensus library, with optimizations for wide-area deployment. Our results show that our ordering service can process up to ten thousand transactions per second and write a transaction irrevocably in the blockchain in half a second, even with peers spread across different continents.