Architecture and Performance Comparison of Permissioned Blockchains Platforms for Smart Contracts

Abstract

Blockchain and Smart Contracts ensure security and automation in trustless scenarios, leading to innovative solutions in various industry branches. The Hyperledger open-source project adopts these technologies in the corporate business, providing platforms for developing distributed applications. This paper analyses and compares two widely used platforms to develop applications based on permissioned blockchains: Hyper-ledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Fabric. We implement two prototypes based on the same smart contract to evaluate the performance of each tool. The results show that: i) Sawtooth parallel transaction execution performs up to 30% better than serial execution only if the number of conflicting transactions remains low, and ii) Fabric has a much faster consensus protocol, but presents a low performance if the transactions are conflicting.