Meet ‘Sawtooth,’ a new modular platform for building enterprise blockchains

The Linux Foundation’s open-source blockchain collaborative, Hyperledger, has unveiled Sawtooth 1.0, a modular framework for building, deploying and running business blockchains.

Blockchain proof-of-concept pilots based on Sawtooth 1.0 have already been deployed to support multiple business cases, including music and media content rights attribution, healthcare transaction recordings, Know Your Customer (KYC) in financial services and others, according to Hyperledger.

Hyperledger Sawtooth is the foundation’s second Hyperledger project to go live after Fabric 1.0 in July 2017. Fabric enables blockchain components, such as consensus and membership services.

Sawtooth is one of the nine business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies hosted by The Linux Foundation, including Hyperledger Composer, a modeling language based on JavaScript and with REST API support.

The resule of efforts by more than 50 software engineers, Hyperledger Sawtooth is designed to deliver capabilities such as on-chain governance, which can utilize self-executing “smart” contracts to vote on blockchain configuration settings such as who’s allowed to participate in a permissioned electronic ledger.

It will offer an advanced transaction execution engine that can process transactions in parallel to accelerate block creation and validation.

Sawtooth will also support Ethereum, the other leading blockchain platform. With the integration, Sawtooth can run smart contracts based on the Ethereum Solidity JavaScript-based programming language. That will enable Sawtooth to run Ethereum tooling such as IDEs and Web3.

Lastly, Sawtooth Dynamic Consensus will allow administrators to modify the blockchain consensus protocol on the fly as a network of nodes or users grows, enabling the integration of more scalable algorithms as they become available.

“We’re beyond excited to see not one, but two of Hyperledger’s active projects hit 1.0,” said Brian Behlendorf,  the executive director of Hyperledger. “This is a huge testament to the strong collaboration of our growing community; I look forward to seeing even more products and services being powered by Hyperledger Sawtooth later this year.”

Last year, Intel was among the vendors to propose versions of code for Sawtooth. Intel’s was called “Sawtooth Lake.”

Along with Intel, Hyperledger Sawtooth is supported by several organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft Azure, R3, and T-Mobile.