As you already know by now, an instance of a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain is referred to as a channel, which is a log of transactions linked to each other in a cryptographically secure manner. To design and run a blockchain application, the first step is to determine how many channels are required. For our trade application, we will use one channel, which will maintain the history of trades carried out among the different participants.
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A Fabric peer may belong to multiple channels, which from the application's perspective will be oblivious to each other, but which help a single peer run transactions in different applications on behalf of its owners (or clients). A channel may run multiple smart contracts, each of which may be an independent application or linked together in a multi-contract application. In this chapter, and in this book, we will walk the reader through the design of a single-channel, single-contract application for simplicity's...