Paper 2023/1717

Fabric-X: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric for Asset Exchange

Marcus Brandenburger, IBM Research - Zurich

May Buzaglo, IBM Research - Haifa

Angelo De Caro, IBM Research - Zurich

Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, IBM Research - Zurich

Alexandros Filios, IBM Research - Zurich

Liran Funaro, IBM Research - Haifa

Yacov Manevich, IBM Research - Zurich

Hagar Meir, IBM Research - Haifa

Senthilnathan Natarajan, IBM Research - Haifa

Manish Sethi, IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Yoav Tock, IBM Research - Haifa

Abstract

The adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for critical financial infrastructures like Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) is hindered by a significant performance gap. Permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric, which are conceptually suitable and have become popular platform used in many production deployments today, are nevertheless limited by architectural bottlenecks. Their monolithic peer design and consensus mechanisms prevent them from achieving the required scale for such demanding applications. This paper presents Fabric-X, a fundamental re-architecture of Hyperledger Fabric that addresses these challenges end-to-end. We have open-sourced Fabric-X as part of the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust at \url{github.com/hyperledger/fabric-x}. We decompose the monolithic peer into independently scalable microservices for endorsement, validation, and committing. To maximize parallelism, we introduce a transaction dependency graph that enables the safe, concurrent validation of transactions across multiple blocks. Complementing the peer redesign, we introduce Arma, a novel sharded Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) ordering service that dramatically increases throughput by ordering compact transaction digests rather than full transaction payloads. We implemented and benchmarked this framework with a UTXO-based CBDC application. Our evaluation demonstrates a peak throughput exceeding 100,000 transactions per second (TPS)—a multiple-orders-of-magnitude improvement over the standard implementation. This work proves that permissioned DLTs can be engineered for national-scale payment systems, providing a resilient and highly performant foundation for practical CBDC deployments and the integration of advanced, computationally intensive features.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1717,
      author = {Elli Androulaki and Marcus Brandenburger and May Buzaglo and Angelo De Caro and Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui and Alexandros Filios and Liran Funaro and Yacov Manevich and Hagar Meir and Senthilnathan Natarajan and Manish Sethi and Yoav Tock},
      title = {Fabric-X: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric for Asset Exchange},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1717},
      year = {2023},
      doi = {10.1145/3788853.3803092},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1717}
}